A nation cannot be unified by dividing a people against themselves. The danger begins when that contradiction becomes a political method.
Tag: political rhetoric
A movement founded on representing those with the least power increasingly depends upon support from those with the most.
Never in the conduct of public affairs has so much risk been imposed upon so many by the reckless certainty of so few, and most of all by the belligerent incompetence of one man.
The Coalition’s recent turn on immigration should not be read only as a policy announcement. I read it as a communication event built around one of the oldest political instruments available: the conversion of broad social anxiety into a visible outsider. In its own language, the Coalition’s Australian Values Migration Plan promises to strengthen “Australian […]
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No Good War
There is a familiar habit among commentators and observers to reach backward into history whenever the present becomes frightening, as though the archive might reassure us that the machinery of civilisation has seen worse and survived. Maybe it has. But what we are dealing with now looks less like a familiar historical episode and more […]
