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https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/9308794/kenny-is-the-political-landscape-inv-for-a-big-course-correction/

Call me naive, but might there be a correction coming - a global renaissance of the human heart?

It is possible that we in the West might yet look back on the first third of the 21st century and feel embarrassed at how wantonly petulant things became.

Ashamed, maybe, that we'd grown so accustomed to peace and pluralism that we nearly traded them in for the tinny kick-down satisfactions of intolerance and tribalism.

The positive signs are there if you look. Individually they seem small. Cumulatively, they can be marshalled to challenge the grim fatalism which has felt permanent since the GFC.

Doubtless, this has been a rough century so far for optimists - collapsing trust in norms and institutions, climate denial, runaway greed and inequality, resurgent racism, a pandemic of incivility, a real pandemic which saw the good-faith efforts of authorities traduced, and an accumulation of unprecedented power in the hands of sociopathic billionaires, oligarchs and autocrats.

But just as you need the blackest night to best see the stars, the hints of something better are twinkling.

Hints like the belated realisation by Angus Taylor last week that appeasing Pauline Hanson's rancorous nationalism meant disaster for the once big-tent Liberal Party, deepening Australia's divisions and hastening national failure.

Not so long ago, an ebullient Hanson was freely attacking the Coalition for plagiarising her policies, branding it gutless.

Not so now. After his curious reluctance to reject Hanson's fanciful Australian "monoculture" plan, Taylor seems to have worked out where his existential threat lay.

He came out swinging in a midweek speech declaring Hanson's vaporous ideas would bring an "eternity of pain", sending inflation soaring and the deficit too. Well done, sir.

Just four of her unfunded promises would cost the government a trillion dollars over a decade.

"That would add around $20,000 a year in interest to the average new mortgage," he told the Sydney Institute.

In a panicked response, Hanson, communing in a London cab with the notorious hard-right racist, Tommy Robinson, pleaded with Taylor by video message for the parties to work together, telling him (embarrassingly) One Nation is not your enemy. Humiliating? Pitiable? All of the above.

Another hint towards correction is the newly confident emergence of socially progressive solutions in the Anglophone democracies. In the UK, the prime minister in waiting, Andy Burnham, parades his progressivism.

His rise signals a renewed belief within British Labour that voters want something more creative than Starmer's incrementalist neo-liberal Tory-lite austerity.

And it coincides with belated scrutiny on the chief clown of British politics, Nigel Farage who, like his Australian analogue, has no stomach for the media attention that comes with the job - especially when it involves explaining multimillion-dollar donations.

Farage's bizarre resignation from the Commons - to stand in a byelection he caused - is scandalous and would make him instantly unelectable in Australia. It shows a brittleness that renders him temperamentally unfit for office.

That hissy-fit and Hanson's plea for Liberal leniency in the political contest suggests that each senses that their dream rise might well have topped out, the prospect of securing real executive power, fading like the sepia photographs that frame their world-view.

There were material advances last week too. Like the ongoing rejection of decades of supposedly impregnable authoritarianism in Hungary.

The new Prime Minister Peter Magyar has now cleaned out the top executives from the major broadcasters, and forced them to run on-screen slides apologising to viewers for "years of lying" for Viktor Orban's corrupt pro-Putin administration.

You even see new moral leadership in a papacy that has stopped giving comfort to rapacious marketism in whatever new frontier has opened up (think artificial intelligence) simply because it is the opposite of communism.

Of course, in each of these domains, good intentions can evaporate, backsliding can occur.

Donald Trump still rules the world and still ignores virtually every check and balance thought to constrain him - including basic decency. His hubristic war with Tehran lingers on interminably, the president behaving more like a mendacious toddler than statesman, branding Iranians as "scum" and so on.

Despite its flagrant illegality and its entirely predictable strategic folly, Australia and Britain distinguished themselves in the negative with their immediate endorsement of Trump's aerial campaign.

Since February 28, however, encouragement can be taken from the refusal of Australia, Britain, NATO and individual European states to join the conflict, despite Trump's threats of economic and strategic punishment.

This is evidence that Trump's lame-duck status already has its international dimension.

The tear-away bestseller Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reminds us that courageous journalists continue to do their jobs and readers continue to value their endeavours.

In a compelling interview with Radio National's Sally Sara, Swan worried that even if the next president is from the left, they would not "voluntarily handcuff themselves" by handing the extraordinary presidential powers garnered by Trump, back to Congress.

However, he then offered this alternative: "After Nixon, there was such a demand from the American public for better government and you did see some efforts to claw back power from the presidency and put in some constraints, and Congress did get its act together - that's also possible".

Too optimistic? Maybe not.

• Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute.

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