How do we comprehend this savagery against someone so conscientious and unifying?

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Especially if it becomes contextualised in an otherwise "valid" politics of division and anger.

The sheer incomprehensibility shocks us into an overdue awakening.

Jarringly, we learn that threats of rape and murder against our elected representatives are endemic, and that there are people among us who act this way.

These are anti-democrats, morally adrift, politically deracinated, dangerous. Are they new or were they always there?

The Minister for Multicultural Affairs Anne Aly reports 19 death threats in the past week alone.

Someone laments via social media on Monday, (that is, before the attack on Helen Haines) that "not enough politicians are afraid for their lives right now," reports Nine's Jacqueline Maley.

Another aggressor observes, in the hours after, that Senator Jacqui Lambie - the subject of a vile One Nation attack - needs to meet a LandCruiser, reports Tanya Plibersek.

Every MP and senator experiences this, but women are vastly more targeted. This is a technologically enabled misogyny, a terrorism where hatred meets impulse. But who would do such a thing? Surely nobody we know, right?

We assume we are all equally appalled but cannot now unknow that some feel differently.

Our social democratic settlement is listing, beset by a variety of forces, not least of which is that we stopped strengthening it decades ago.

Renovation is urgent. Our leaders behaved as if democracy was a self-expressing, self-renewing, self-legitimising machine. That it was girded by rules, fixed players, agreed norms, even as their parties gamed it to death by ignoring safe seat voters - their own and their opponents'.

The key to the whole thing was that voters recognised the legitimacy of the government even if........

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