Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club speech exposed the weakness in the old right-wing politics of subtraction: in an age of scarcity, promising to take things away no longer lands on someone else, but on the voters she needs.

For decades the Australian right has won by taking things away and calling it discipline. It worked because the loss always fell on someone else, and because good times left a buffer to absorb it. Pauline Hanson has just reached for that same move in an age of scarcity, when there is no buffer left and no one else to blame, and aimed it squarely at her own base.

Every politics is, at bottom, a transaction. You offer people something and ask for their vote in return. No matter how hard some of the commentariat attempt to suggest it’s something more pure. The interesting question is what you offer, and for a long time one of the most reliable offers in the western democratic repertoire was not a gift but a removal: vote for me and I will take something away – I will cut the tax, shrink the state, wind back the entitlement, discipline the bludger, end the waste.

This is the politics of subtraction, and to understand why it is failing now you first have to understand why it ever worked.

It worked despite a fact that should have killed it in the cradle. Human beings hate losing things. The psychologists Kahneman and Tversky measured it precisely: a loss is felt about twice as keenly as an equivalent gain. Take a hundred dollars from someone and the sting outlasts, by a wide margin, the pleasure of having given them a hundred. A politics built on taking is therefore swimming against the strongest current in the voter’s mind, in their DNA, built into humans’ primal survival instincts. That it succeeded at all is the puzzle. The answer is that successful subtraction was never sold as taking from you. It was always sold as taking from them.

This is the trick at the heart of the whole tradition. Reagan did not campaign on cutting the incomes of working Americans; he campaigned........

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