Once upon a time politics was about pitching to the sensible centre, not preaching to the converted. Increasingly, it isn’t. Increasingly, political conversation is conducted inside bubbles, and the bubbles don’t intersect.



The bubbles – little self-contained universes where protagonists feel their own feelings and choose their own facts – float rancorously past one another, never the twain.

I was struck by the pervasiveness of bubble politics this week while watching the first head-to-head debate in the United States between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Debate would actually be a misnomer, given it was actually two monologues, running parallel to each other, without obvious intersection points.

Consensus: Clinton wins debate – but Trump is far from finished Read more

Clinton was immaculately prepared, measured and articulate – impressive as she generally is – but after 90 minutes watching her, based on that outing, I couldn’t really tell you why she wanted to be president. I kept listening in the hope I’d hear it, that she would reach out and hook me and reel me in through the simple articulation of her moment in history. But there was no clear pitch – apart from I’m not the lunatic.

I get why the primary season in the US is about conversations in-house – obviously candidates are seeking the endorsement of their tribe – but once that’s done I expected a kind of broadening. I’d expected some kind of inclusive appeal to Trump supporters, given the white working-class vote should not be an entirely lost cause for the Democratic party, at least not post-global financial crisis.

I’d expected she would talk to them about the faux everyman they were thinking of backing for the White House, and she did, a little bit, but mainly she spoke to her supporters in staccato winks. The critique of Trump was genial and roundabout, as if we all got the joke, as if the target audience was the editorial board of the New York Times, not the people casting their votes in November who would never even think to buy a copy.

She was passive in her orderliness. Clinton presented to the voting public with a modest kind of righteousness, as if that was the required benchmark, rather than brute, cut-through persuasiveness – a sanguine disposition which seemed premature, given the gruelling contest is only now entering the decisive phase.

As for Trump, it was more of his shtick: he was defiantly post-fact, post-ideology, post-coherence – stroking his angry, alienated tribe, the people he has spent months courting and comforting with his authoritarian tendencies, framing himself as the last living saviour of the white working man of a certain age oppressed by globalisation, by mouthy women, by the “other” of the moment – Mexicans – by the Chinese.

Trump has reeled his tribe in by pretending to understand them, by pretending to stand with them against the establishment cliche that is Hillary Clinton. That’s his brand of self-satisfied righteousness, the cynically constructed comic strip that is “Donald, professional underdog”, a nonsense he delivers with brittle conviction, aided and abetted by the echo chamber on Fox News, a rolling cacophony of bobble heads high on imagined liberal conspiracy.

Trump’s central pitch was easier to identify, but he made absolutely no effort to engineer some kind of crossover conversation. There was no broadening his appeal, no toning it down, no presidential affect, no pitch to the swinging centre.

An audience of millions erupted on social media in howls of acclamation and derision, like there was nothing more at stake than a thumbs up or thumbs down emoji. Feelings were brittle. Commentary was scornful and punishing, a mass study in confirmation bias.

Increasingly, this is politics. Spectacle and sideshow, followed by a lurch into hell.

Back at home, things are also grim. We seemed to have maxed out on exciting times. Our bubbles are floating, disconnected, across our political landscape. Post-election, you can feel the national discourse fracturing.

There are eddies of culture war swirling. Race is back on the political agenda. Outside the Canberra crucible, close to half the country say they don’t want Muslims in Australia because they don’t integrate. Another 40% don’t want a bar of discrimination. As fault lines go, it’s stark.

The reactionary right is limbering up for a fresh frolic on multiculturalism, wheeling out Pauline Hanson as their Trojan horse, trolling the left by deriding broad statements of tolerance and gestures of inclusion as virtue signalling or indulgent forays into identity politics – and the pro-globalisation left is shaping up to gratify their opponents by being serially outraged, by taking the bait.

Rhetoric ratchets up. There’s a round of vigorous bubble bumping, amplified by the echo chamber of the 24/7 news cycle, and the starkly polarised commentariat, protagonists hector and declaim, no one explains and reasons. Meanwhile, the social fabric frays.

It could be abstractly interesting if it wasn’t dangerous, if manufactured polarisation for glib political gratification and clicks and eyeballs didn’t have obvious human consequences.

The antidote is humanism and generosity. Piercing the bubble is the only way to disrupt the cycle. The times require a politician with the confidence to reach out to the people, not with Trumpesque manipulations, but with a genuine desire to connect.

I harbour a modest hope that, periodically at least, Malcolm Turnbull will agree with himself.

Malcolm Turnbull was once the great hope of the sensible centrist side. Tribalism, in his universe, was considered coarse. But bubble politics is grossly intolerant of protagonists who look to form durable connections outside the tribe. Empathy is somehow suspect. In bubble politics, totemic statements of reassurance to fellow travellers seem to be more highly prized than workaday pragmatism. There’s a strange nihilism about the whole enterprise.

Turnbull’s trajectory has seen him placate his fellow bubble dwellers after he took the leadership as a gesture of good will – to send a message of inclusion. The early concessions damaged him. Now he’s locked into a cycle of concessions to stay alive. He’s being sucked back inside the Coalition bubble, issue after issue, at a time when Australians need him to be speaking to them, not genuflecting before his own people.

After placating the right on the plebiscite, and walking back superannuation reforms he’d been proud of in the May budget, this week we’ve had a grand rhetorical gesture on renewable energy, which was suddenly suspect because a super storm had felled 20-odd transmission pylons and plunged South Australia into blackout.

Turnbull once openly scorned people who substituted ideology for evidence. Perhaps if you can’t beat them, eventually, you join them. The prime minister had “no doubt” (despite the complete lack of evidence) the “extremely aggressive” shift to renewables was a factor in the South Australian blackouts. “I regret to say that a number of the state Labor governments have over the years set priorities and renewable targets that are extremely aggressive, extremely unrealistic, and have paid little or no attention to energy security,” he said.

Malcolm Turnbull says South Australia blackout a wake-up call on renewables Read more

The audience for this flourish of feelpinion was internal, not external. To be clear, I’m not a bubble dweller. I find the hothouse conditions stifling. I don’t require the prime minister to agree with me on any particular policy proposition. I harbour a modest hope that, periodically at least, he will agree with himself.

I understand there is a more complex dynamic in play presently than a weakened prime minister performing a grim liturgical dance for the gratification of people with the power to move against him. At the broader strategic level, there is clearly an element of circling the wagons going on. Turnbull is trying to keep his fractious troops together when in practice the Coalition in 2016 is a conservative party with Hansonesque leanings and a centrist liberal party.

Most days, in abundant ways, we see how hard it is to synthesise those differences. In attempting to rally and bind his troops, perhaps our individualist prime minister has become a tribalist, after all.

Bubbles really can’t be avoided in modern politics. Depressingly, it is the way of things. The prime minister has to develop the trick of subsistence in the bubble, but he also has to puncture it, forcefully when necessary, both to avoid slow suffocation and as a gesture of recognition – because outside the cloisters the Australian people are watching and hoping that someone in major party politics can rise above the aggressive insularity and the brinkmanship, give them the courtesy of a genuine conversation, and face up to the challenges of the moment.