An interesting new phrase has emerged: "disordered discourse". It attempts to explain the collapse of political debate in the West.

The term migrated from psychiatry where it’s used to explain language distortions like patients becoming wildly hyperbolic, going off at tangents, exhibiting strange associations between ideas or veering into incoherence.

The expression "word salad" is often linked to disordered discourse. Eliot Higgins, who runs the investigative journalism outfit Bellingcat, has been discussing it, and seems to be on to something.

We talk about living in the post-truth age. Indeed, we’ve transited through the post-truth age to the post-reality age where disparate groups share no common ground.

The death of any shared reality reveals itself in thoughts and ideas – discourse – which seem truly bizarre, or disordered.

We hear comments today that frankly would have seen you jeered from the public stage a decade ago.

The disorder is a two-way street afflicting both left and right. No group is immune as the very nature of being in a group today – a hard-delineated political subset fixed around identity – means estrangement from all other groups.

Estrangement causes derangement, perhaps. The left is guilty, certainly, though it’s on the ascendant right where you’ll find discourse that’s truly disordered.

Read more by Neil Mackay

Among the left, it’s primarily on the swivel-eyed fringes where you’ll hear people claim that songs like Walk Like An Egyptian by The Bangles are acts of cultural appropriation, or that The Tempest subjects audiences to colonial trauma (in fact, if you’ve studied the play, it’s more accurately interpreted as Shakespeare's critique of colonialism).

On the right, though, grotesque exaggeration, thin-skinned fragility........

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