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A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Implicitly at least, a landmark new book, The Twilight of Exceptionalism: The Liberal and Conservative Era, might equally have been titled, "After the Party's Over".
But to which party would that title refer? Would it be Australia as a whole, which, as Donald Horne noted, had the good fortune to be endowed with vast resources and an inheritance of sensible institutions?
Or more specifically, to the Liberal Party - a mainstay of post-war Australia whose outlook suddenly looks anything but assured?
There is a pervading sense from Paul Kelly, Australia's preeminent big picture, conservative political observer, that something fundamental has cracked within the mechanism of the country. Is it the economy, the stolidity of the Liberal-National parties, the historic ambition of the ALP, or maybe something more atmospheric and ethereal, call it, the magic?
Or is it a mismatch between politics and culture? Perhaps voters themselves have stopped believing?
In fact it might be all of these things at once.
So, why "exceptionalism", a term most commonly applied to the unique latitude America relies on to explain itself?
For Kelly, it refers to the passing of a golden period of uncommon global overperformance marked by a major party willingness to undertake reform and to embrace imaginative policy remedies without paroxysms of national doubt or a full-blown crisis of institutional-national purpose.
In Kelly's broadest conception, Australia had benefited enormously since the 1980s from a centre-anchored right/left political contest which, whatever its noisy differences, delivered usefully long slabs of electoral continuity and policy creativity - Hawke-Keating Labor over 13 years immediately followed by the Howard-Costello coalition lasting 11 years.
Both long runs brought missteps but also delivered derring-do which facilitated economic growth, rising wages, and profound transformations from financial deregulation, privatisation and Medicare, to a reshaped tax base via a GST, a resources boom, and rude fiscal health.
Twilight, however, focuses its energy on what came next. Following on from Triumph and Demise, his study of Labor's Rudd-Gillard meltdown, Twilight chronicles a feverish period of instability on the conservative side of the aisle through three tumultuous premierships from 2013 to 2022.
Over a staggering 766 pages, Kelly lays out a confronting read for the party convinced of its centrality to the national story, while being written out of its future.
It constitutes a multi-page intervention for a mainstream party which has fallen in with a bad crowd, succumbing to the zoot allures of polarising rhetoric and applause of fanatics on subscription TV.
Kelly's perspicacity as the lodestar of Australian centre-right political journalism, makes his conclusions about the conservative identity crisis all the more compelling even if his tendency to pontificate attracts its share of critics on the left.
This is, ultimately, an account of how the liberal-conservative failure occurred - from the bizarre mistakes of Tony Abbott to the ineffective corrective of Malcolm Turnbull, and then the slipperiness of Scott Morrison. Thus, it invites the most crucial question - what is to be done now? Is Angus Taylor the answer, or exhibit one in the case against a Liberal revival?
Is Taylor's hyperbole about "a rotten Labor government" really just code for a delusional born-to-rule mindset which is no longer relevant? He wouldn't be the first.
Even when he got there in 2013, Kelly writes, "Abbott was operating on cracked foundations from the start".
"He believed politics was returning to normal after the six years of aberration under Rudd and Gillard. But the culture of politics had changed."
Turnbull, Kelly concludes, was a brilliant man of great accomplishments in business and the law, but his inexperience in politics - which Turnbull himself paraded as a virtue - rendered him ill-equipped to read his own party. Like Rudd before him, Turnbull's party room authority depended on his popularity with voters. When Turnbull lost all but one seat of Abbott's 2013 majority in the disastrous 2016 double-dissolution election, that control evaporated.
Then came Scott Morrison, whom he defines as a product of three core values: faith, family and country.
Kelly writes sympathetically that Morrison was inter alia, conservative, old-fashioned, suburban, as well as restless and pushy. He considers him pragmatic before ideological. Yet he also notes he was a poor politician who, in his churchy insularity, had completely missed wider social developments like the feminisation of the economy and politics and the rise of empathy in communications.
He was "good at what blokes used to do: act, not feel".
In part this conforms to a wider lament, that politics has shifted from its original "manly" purpose of fixing problems to a new goal of serving a zeitgeist which emphasises "moral gestures and emotive compassion".
This complaint, like much in politics, can be read two ways - either as observation or conservative grievance. Yet these don't have to be mutually exclusive.
As the Liberal-National parties languish in third place behind an ascendant One Nation - the rise of which has upended everything from polling assumptions to the way Labor is now messaging and governing - a crucial question arises: is the Liberal-National party already over?
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.