Once again, this week, I heard reports about inflation, interest rates, immigration, employment, and also sex-related humour. How do we keep our scorecards about such ‘hot potatoes’?

Chris Kenny attempted to explore some of these core issues in his program about the Fight for the Right. It was interesting, but I am not sure it got to the depths of what is happening. For example, after listening to Angus Taylor again, my thought was, ‘He seems like a really good fella.’

Do I trust him? Personally, yes. As a politician, I want to. And yet I find that I cannot. Why? Because, like Jess Wilson will find out after she becomes Premier, if you keep ‘wets’ around you, they act like drips until someone drowns.

What then might give us a better thermometer about what is happening politically?

Nigel Biggar might come closer to a realistic description in his recent book, The New Dark Age. It reads like a case study about what Rod Dreher described in his Live Not by Lies. Biggar’s case study is grounded in life within universities rather than society generally.

Both agreed about one key dynamic – reason becomes suspended in the pursuit of an ideal, regardless of facts and truth.

Scarily, they both refer to similarities with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Usefully, Dreher collated a list from those whom he interviewed to describe these changes in some detail. They had all lived through a transition from soft totalitarianism to hard totalitarianism. They declared that they were now seeing the same kind of change in parts of the West.

The personal side of living through this transition is not lost on Dreher. In his introduction, he explains the unsettling impact for people who escaped communism to see some similar patterns in the West:

What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. (p. xi)

Here is, I propose, our new checklist to evaluate how our governments are going.

It is a sliding list – just like our governments who slide from one deceit to the next.

It is a cumulative list – each step feeds the next, just like the current governments who start one untruth to build another untruth.

And it is a progressive list – progressive in the same way that political progressives are actually ‘social destructives’.

STEP 1 – We grow in loneliness and social atomisation

Did we need a book like Bowling Alone, or one about Somewhere and Anywhere to tell us that our sense of local community has been diminishing in many aspects of life? Children are not raised by families or extended families as much anymore. They are raised by families and government-paid agents. Old people, if they escape the influence of MAID-like programs, are not housed with their adult children and grandchildren as much. They are cared for by government-subsidised agents.

STEP 2 – We lose faith in hierarchies and institutions

Are results of surveys indicating a loss of confidence in governments, or banks, or large corporates, or certain experts (like government modellers), unexpected anymore? No.

STEP 3 – We desire to transgress and destroy

Why was the aggressive, angry and threatening mob outside a One Nation meeting recently too familiar? We say that peaceful protest is part of a healthy democracy, but we tolerate, accept, and even defend the right of people to disrupt, damage property, intimidate, and threaten harm to others as if it is just part of life. Well, in one way it is – part of decaying life together.

STEP 4 – Propaganda increases, as does the willingness to believe useful lies

When did it turn? When were politicians allowed to get away with being crude, lying, self-contradictory storytellers of self-interested narratives with such impunity? I grew up with this quaint idea of leaders having what is now a most strange characteristic – honour. They gave their word and keep it. If not, they were expected to step aside. Now we hear ‘my word is my bond’ – until it isn’t. Changing positions can excuse any development, regardless of the pain, without apology, and with some ‘look over there’ pretend reason.

STEP 5 – Mania for ideology grows and replaces reason

I am simply dumbfounded at why every news channel and current affairs program is not running weekly reminders: of all the climate predictions that have been downright wrong; of all the modelling of anything that has been downright wrong; of all the fiscal projections that have been downright wrong – and of the lack of admissions about these wrongs, and the lack of apologies, and the lack of adjustments.

STEP 6 – Leaders, and then (subservient) followers value loyalty more than expertise, facts, and truth

We hear regularly of the ‘unity’ within the current Labor government. I suspect the Cabinet is run on soft totalitarianism – pragmatic conformity to keep one’s position. This personal experience of pseudo-strength probably explains why they are moving the rest of us to their hard totalitarianism.

And every time I see one of our current Federal Ministers simply enjoying themselves in their role (I suspect the Prime Minister and Climate Minister are even laughing on the inside at their luck of doing whatever it takes, and the mugs believing them), I see the pigs in Animal Farm with their snouts at the same table as the other controllers. Yuk.