Depending on your politics, the monsters are everywhere. Perhaps you see them in the form of tech billionaires and the artificial intelligence they’re developing. Perhaps you see them in the bin fire of social media they bequeathed us before that, or the legacy media that refuse to tell you “the truth”. You might see them in the manosphere, or the institutions teaching our kids gender fluidity. Maybe you see them in the migrant youth wielding machetes in the suburbs, or the refugee attempting to behead someone on a Belfast street. Or perhaps you see them in the violent anti-immigrant mobs that torched houses in response. If so, you’ll likely see them in the Marches for Australia or to Unite the Kingdom rallies, organised by far-right groups but attended by many more besides. You’ll almost certainly see them in at least one of Hamas, Israel or those local advocates at each other’s throats over the Middle East. I suspect you’ll see them in Russia but that can no longer be assumed. And I’d guess that you’d see them in at least one political party with a significant share of the vote.

Something in that paragraph probably outraged you. In which case, you’re probably seeing monsters in whoever sees different monsters from you. It would be easy here to make a point about polarisation. But I want to look at the deep disquiet that lies underneath.

Within the commotion of our times – Trump or wokeness or Zohran Mamdani’s stunning win in New York – is a common verdict that the conventional order has failed. It cannot be reformed, or tweaked to fulfil its purpose. It is more that the promises it made have been fundamentally broken, that it is simply incapable of delivering the good life. Perhaps it never was, perhaps it can no longer – the flavour of the rejections vary but the terminus is the same. The disillusionment does not stem from the sense that we’re going through a rough patch or that conventional wisdom isn’t delivering. It’s that it can’t deliver.

Speaking to The Monthly about inflation and cost of living, the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, says “all of these rolling shocks for 20 years have been cumulative. And every time it feels like ordinary people are going to get off the mat, something else arrives.” It’s a perceptive diagnosis, but to describe things more fully it needs to acknowledge that these rolling shocks span the economic, social, political and cultural realms.

Consider even a cursory list … September 11 and the “war on terror” placed security front and centre. The 2005........

© The Guardian