In one of their typically literary sketches, 1990s comedy duo Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie asked if Adolf Hitler’s fanatical racist oratory would have been as charismatic if delivered in English.
It’s a joke that has no answer, of course, but there is little doubt that national characteristics including history, public debate and electoral institutions have framed the way politics is discussed in notionally open societies.
Political actors venturing beyond these informal boundaries have courted controversy and opprobrium. Transgressions could be career-ending.
But such limits have never been entirely static and may now be tumbling entirely as the failures of neoliberalism and globalism feed a widening distrust in old orthodoxies.
Increasingly, high-profile nationalist and populist movements in many countries are making a virtue of eschewing the usual etiquette of politics in favour of divisive hyperbole.
In the digitised global media age, these nativist forces can also cross-pollinate.
Within New Zealand’s Luxon coalition government, for example, far-right support for rolling back Maori rights under the Treaty of Waitangi takes encouragement from Australia’s refusal to recognise First Nations Peoples in the Constitution.
In two Australian states in the past few weeks, (South Australia and Queensland), ultra-conservative Liberal MPs have been associated with attempts to recriminalise abortion.
The revival of an incendiary debate that had largely been settled in Australia felt like it came from nowhere. In fact, it probably came from post-Roe v Wade America.
Such is the reach of an abrasive populism paraded by Donald Trump, who now openly describes his opponent, Kamala Harris, as “a sh-t vice president”.
Trump’s very viability as a Republican presidential candidate – which seemed unthinkable when he fomented a deadly insurrection of the US Capitol in 2021 – has shown polite norms and even long-established laws can be made politically........