Liberal leadership hopeful Andrew Hastie sent an email to supporters over the weekend, doubling-down in his unnecessary public spat with Pauline Hanson.

‘Since I last wrote to you, I’ve received an overwhelming number of messages, emails, letters, and phone calls of support. It means a great deal to know you have my back… Thank you for standing with me.’

There’s a PR trick in which you presume a thing to be true, in order to make the reader feel out of place if they don’t agree.

I’ll take an educated guess that there are some on Hastie’s e-mail list who do not ‘have his back’ on this one.

For a soldier with some level of seniority, good battle strategy seems to have momentarily escaped him.

Andrew Hastie’s strategy appears to involve going hard on the attack. But this is an attack on his own side of politics, remember.

His battleground tactics are twofold: call Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce ‘lying cowards’ and expand the scope of the ‘traitor’ insult in the Please Explain cartoon to other veterans who are not in politics.

He writes. ‘…this is bigger than me. More than 20 other combat veterans also gave evidence in the Ben Roberts-Smith case. They served their country and gave evidence when required to do so.’

It is my view that is the approach of an officer disoriented in the weeds of battle who has lost sight of the bigger picture. In military terms, Mr Hastie is suffering target fixation and tactical myopia.

And it’s symptomatic of a problem plaguing the wider Liberal Party establishment as it grapples with the greatest existential crisis the party has ever seen.

They don’t understand who the enemy is.

Pauline Hanson is not the problem. One Nation is not the problem. Barnaby Joyce is not the problem. Even Labor and the Greens aren’t the Liberal Party’s worst enemy.

The Liberal Party’s worst enemy is itself. And until those who currently wield power in that ever-shrinking, sinking ship understand that fact, there’s next to zero prospect of survival.

We saw this foolish thinking play out among both the Democratic and Republican Party elites in the United States.

Everything became about Donald Trump. But Trump wasn’t the problem. Trump was just the person who picked up the ball that had already been played and ran with it.

Years before Trump emerged, the grassroots conservative Tea Party movement had been a growing political force. People were fed up with what they saw as a ‘uniparty’ democracy taken over by high-level bureaucrats in Washington, feeding their own coffers with public money and unrestrained growth at the expense of hard-working small-business people and workers.

Sound familiar?

Early iterations of the American Tea Party movement began forming around Ron Paul’s presidential run in late 2007, and officially burst onto the national scene in early 2009. Although Trump had flirted with politics for decades he only stepped up in 2015.

Hastie’s current strategy – and all those like it that the Liberal Party attempts – are doomed to fail.

Because they miss the point. It’s tunnel vision, to coin another military phrase.

The wider anti-left and anti-Woke cultural movement is the problem for the current Liberal Party leadership, not Pauline or Barnaby, or the razor-sharp political mind of One Nation strategist and Please Explain creator James Ashby.

The movement is bigger than all of them. And the movement is not going away.

The cause of the movement was the left’s over-reach on neo-Marxist post-modernist nonsense and – perhaps even more importantly – the Liberal Party’s total failure for many years, to do anything to counter it.

For years, anyone in the party who dared to speak out about the cultural shift was shut down, ostracised and even banned and barred from membership. A small cohort of Liberal and National Party ‘powerbrokers’ foolishly thought that these people would be powerless without the established parties’ cloak, branding and organisational structures.

So powerful was this movement that the Liberal Party left would have done well to listen and adapt. It needed to embrace it and work with it, not attempt to shut it down.

It was apparent in the middle of the Morrison era that the movement was growing and gaining momentum. Yet still the Liberal Party left did not see the writing on the wall. Still they continued to shut down internal dissent and critique, silence warnings, ostracise those who sought a return to core values.

The only way out of this mess is reflection, remorse, humility, contrition and apology. Don’t hold your breath.

Hastie’s current tactical approach demonstrates no shift towards this mindset within the party whatsoever.

Far from attacking Pauline Hanson and One Nation, the Liberal Party should be bending over backwards to work alongside it while it still has a small hope of survival and rebuild. Because the movement isn’t Pauline. It’s almost a third of the nation. Most of whom used to vote blue.