Consider two contrasting sensations of the past week: Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the mayoral election in New York City, and the admittedly lower-key ascent of One Nation and similarly conservative politicians, culminating in a new poll placing Pauline Hanson, Barnaby Joyce and Andrew Hastie among the most liked politicians in the country, while One Nation polls up to 14 per cent.

Both feel like significant, trend-bucking events, defying the conventional wisdom of the moment. In the US, a socialist Muslim anti-Zionist is meant to be unelectable. In Anthony Albanese’s Australia, political profit is meant to be won in the centre, avowed right-wing politics leading only to the political wilderness.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has surged in the polls, while socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani has been elected mayor of New York City.Credit: Nine Publishing

Both cases will invite true believers to hopeful conclusions: that the path to Democrat revival in America is to jolt the establishment sharply to the left, and that the Coalition’s future in Australia lies in right-wing stridency. But what if rather than buck the trend, these events reinforce it? Because if you think of our current political moment as the result of long-term social changes rather than flashes in the pan, each of them makes the most sense as a continuation of those trends, rather than a disruption.

Mamdani, for instance, has proved just how exhausted and alien New Yorkers find the Democrat establishment. While the old school attacked Mamdani on Israel, a third of Jewish New Yorkers voted........

© The Sydney Morning Herald