We've been hearing it now for years. The persistent right-wing complaint about political correctness is that it incentivises victimhood and spawned identity politics.
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Now, though, things in the victim-claiming stakes have become murkier than the river Seine.
Like when a hard-right male backbencher rejected criticism after rolling a female frontbencher for the safest position on South Australia's Liberal Party senate ticket.
"The gender card is nothing but a grievance narrative," explained an unrepentant Alex Antic, claiming feminism's victim status had no basis in social reality but was instead a creation of an "activist media and a disgruntled political class".
In general terms, this "class" can be taken to include 'establishment' parliamentarians, journalists, creatives, economists and educated professionals within the knowledge economy.
In other words, not merely left-wing progressives, but big business, big health, big media, big science.
Now, however, the tables have turned. On the populist right, an eruptive victimhood is central to both identity and strategy.
The new, 'legitimate' grievance? That a hegemonic social and economic consensus has betrayed ordinary working-class people - folks whose jobs have disappeared at the hands of what the American political commentator David Brooks calls "the creative destruction of modern capitalism".
Originally conceived along class divisions between capital and labour, orthodox right-left parties are ill-suited to this new binary.
Writing in The New York Times last week, Brooks noted "across the Western world, right-wing parties have ceased to be parties of business elites and have become working-class parties".
![Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with running mate JD Vance. Picture Getty Images Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with running mate JD Vance. Picture Getty Images](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/RXMuw2JbrrS7ELSxSY9rkR/404c029e-faeb-4e44-9173-718b0ceeb7ba.jpg/r0_0_2717_1528_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"MAGA (Make America Great Again) is the worldview that accords with this shifting reality".
Peter Dutton has been consistently pulling the once business-based Liberal Party in a similar direction. "I've said repeatedly that the modern Liberal Party is the friend of the worker ... we're not the party of big business, and I don't pretend that we are," he said late last year.
Whether you agree with them or not, Dutton, Antic and their ilk are speaking effectively to a self-describing movement of anti-elite, even anti-intellectual populism rising within most liberal democracies.
This tide is coming fast. It was only desperate eleventh-hour sandbagging by bickering centrist and left-wing parties in France a fortnight ago, which saved that country from Marine Le Pen's extremist and xenophobic National Rally (for now).
In America, a populist surge is assuming tsunami-like proportions.
To Australian ears and eyes, the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee was crass and counterfeit replete with unsubtle evangelical allusions to an Earthly second coming by its flawed saviour, Donald Trump.
Yet to the GOP's MAGA devotees, these Old Testament allusions were supported by observable fact: a fabled second nomination, a second presidency and, on the eve of the convention, a resurrection. It was a miracle he survived, and yet here he was to lead them out of the woke morass of migrants and multiculturalism, transgendered toilets and befuddling pronouns.
And if you remained unconvinced, he was there to lay it all out in the first person, like a boasting teenager recounting a heroic story to his transfixed younger siblings.
He'd been crucified figuratively by the left-liberal press, impeached (twice) by his enemies, hounded by false allegations and convicted by radical left Democrat-aligned courts.
And when that didn't stop him, an assassin gave it a shot for real. Through it all, he'd suffered for them.
His journey to the nomination convention was a script that would have strained the credibility of the trashiest airport novel, yet Americans had witnessed it with their own eyes. Past critics crumbled in the face of his power, desperate for the Messiah's favour. Nikki Haley had called him unhinged but now kissed the ring. Ditto countless others.
So transformative was this redemption-saviour story, even among the most pious Christian moralists, it fully cleansed Trump's feet of the iniquity he'd spent a lifetime visiting.
So dismissive of orthodoxies was it that it became trite to marvel at how the favourite for the White House is a jury convicted fraudster who fomented a deadly insurrection at the Capitol after the last election.
In any other democracy, this alone would render a candidate ineligible.
Four years ago, Trump was a vulgar gate-crasher who stole his party's nomination. Now, no less vulgar, he owns them all.
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Of course it helps the Democrats lacked the basic grit to plan for this eventuality.
The most devastating headline I saw in recent days was "Democrats in disarray as GOP unites behind Trump".
Trump's pick of the 39-year-old isolationist JD Vance as his vice-presidential running mate has been widely lauded as strategically smart. Like Haley, Vance is a former "never Trumper", turned fawning acolyte.
Now he could be the next populist miracle - from "hillbilly" to White House as long as doesn't outshine the King.
The contradictions are legion. Perhaps we should not be so surprised. As the camera panned across the gleefully gullible audience, it seemed every second face was surgically altered.
In the US, like no other culture, deception is a game of mutual participation embraced equally by presenter and audience alike.
Maybe this is the secret to this unfeasibly white-toothed theatre? In a culture that refuses a mature relationship with maturity itself, flip-flopping from trenchant critic to feckless disciple is as cost-free as being fanatically pro-life and pro-gun.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.