Joe Hildebrand: Extremism is a threat that always comes knocking

The alleged assassination plot against Peter Dutton is chilling enough in and of itself – but it is also a chilling sign of both how strong and fragile our democracy is, writes Joe Hildebrand.

The alleged assassination plot against Peter Dutton is chilling enough in and of itself – but it is also a chilling sign of both how strong and fragile our democracy is.

As if by fate, I was listening to an old UK podcast about Australian prime ministers just as the news broke, and the two historians were marvelling at the ritual toppling of PMs that resulted in four first-term prime ministers being rolled in a single decade between 2010 and 2020.

The terms “assassination” and “knifed” and “stabbed in the back” were bandied about with abandon, just as we here breezily describe such party coups – safe in the knowledge that actual assassinations and knifings are anathema to Australian politics.

Sadly, that is not technically true. The NSW state MP for Cabramatta, John Newman, was gunned down in his driveway in 1994 at the behest of a political rival, marking this nation’s only confirmed political assassination.

I know intimately that this sent shockwaves right to the very top of the political establishment, but the uniqueness and local pettiness of this awful event almost seemed to confirm that such acts were an aberration in our society.

The funeral procession for murdered MP John Newman (inset).

British politicians had been targeted and killed, and US presidents are too often famed as much for their deaths as their lives – but in Australia we take for granted that, however bad things get, they will never get to that.

Indeed, as the historians mused and I took in the news, the Australian political system and Australian society itself was in fact so secure and stable that it could tolerate the rapid-fire routing of PMs while life continued on as normal.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton (right) was the target of an alleged assassination plot. Picture: Martin Keep/AFP

They were right, of course. During the bizarre two-week interregnum in which Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott tried to form minority government in 2010 – people even joked about nobody being in charge and so the country could do whatever it wanted.

And it did do what it wanted, which was to plod on happily.

But politics has become more febrile and feverish, and ferocious since then. Fuelled by social media, which is dominated by activists and extremists and polemicists and propagandists, the institutions and assumptions we once relied upon for stability have been constantly attacked and undermined.

The result of this has been seismic surges from both the Left and the Right that have produced the most unstable geopolitical climate since the interwar period a century ago. And we know what that led to.

Or do we? The rise of political extremism in the 1920s and 1930s is perhaps the greatest human tragedy in all of human history. The Russian Revolution and the subsequent fear of Bolshevism was the Nazi Party’s No.1 ticket to power.

The fact that Lenin himself had literally been given the ticket by the Kaiser – who sent him on a train to Russia in World War I – seems to be a subtlety that escaped them.

But we cannot let it escape the rest of us. Extremism is a threat that is always knocking on the door of politics. And it is not trying to break in but trying to break out.

Extremism is what happens when people feel the system is failing them and they are not being listened to. It is what happens when people in power decide they know what is best despite the wishes of people who feel they have no power at all.

And then it only takes one charismatic leader from within the establishment to break ranks and promise that all those wishes can be fulfilled. Enter Donald Trump or Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen or Pauline Hanson. Or, on the Left – or even the centre – Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders or Justin Trudeau or Emmanuel Macron.

Extreme politicians (clockwise from top left) Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Pauline Hanson, Emmanuel Macron, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

None of the above would consider themselves extremists but their opponents do, and that is the point. Extremism always begets more extremism.

And as the populist Right and the bourgeois Left continue to swing in and out of power, ordinary people feel more and more confused and abandoned.

At the same time it pushes ideologues on both sides into ever more extreme positions, to the point where a recent US poll found a majority of leftists would support the assassination of the US President.

Killing a democratically elected president seems a strange hill for peace-loving progressives to die on and yet here we are. Now there is an alleged assassination plot against an Australian would-be prime minister.

Justice will take its course in this case. The rest of us should ask ourselves just how far we are willing to descend into the mindless decay of decency and civility that will soon destroy everything we hold dear.

Get The Real Story with Joe Hildebrand wherever you get your podcasts

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Extremism is a threat that always comes knocking