"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself", said Franklin D. Roosevelt during his presidential inauguration.

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FDR's reform message had been pitch-perfect to an electorate hungry for new ideas and betrayed by economic calamity. His 1933 New Deal promised to lift working-class Americans out of penury while expanding the purview of national government.

Nearly a century later, there is a new great depression, albeit unnamed. This one afflicts the body democratic though its roots draw on a persistent inequality.

Across the West, its currencies are fear and frustration - the dark matter of an asymmetric political universe, at once intangible yet endemic.

Among established political parties, these things manifest as furrowed brows and cautious tinkering when dramatic interventions are plainly required. Among voters, they show up as impatience, institutional desertion and party-political delamination. The centre cannot hold.

Nostalgic populism is an obvious beneficiary. But it is an illusion. By narrowing the mind and hardening the heart, it offers solace not solutions. It valorises an avowedly Australian strength but trades in injury and complaint. Its wellsprings owe more to retreat than any advance. Fear of change. Fear of the future. Fear of others.

Amid this penchant for demolition, there are other opportunities.

As Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers prepare their first budget of their second term, they face two quite different paths.

The orthodox response emphasises continuity and the avoidance of sudden moves. This means minor taxing and spending tweaks aimed primarily at short-term amelioration while leaving the main fiscal architecture in place.

Alternatively, they could read the deepening malady of Australia's spirit as not merely a problem to be minimised but rather a window to new thinking.

This version involves a clear-eyed assessment of the burgeoning failures in........

© Canberra Times