Dark satanic troll factory foreman bemoans falling market share for dark satanic troll content.

A place to stay,

Enough to eat.

Somewhere old heroes shuffle safely down the street.

Where you can speak out loud about your doubts and fears,

And what’s more,

No one ever disappears,

You never hear their standard issue kicking in the door.

- Pink Floyd. The Final Cut. 1983.

What a lot of socialist claptrap, eh? A roof over your head and some hot food in your tum? The consensus terrorists, formerly known as the Canberra Press Gallery, have a message for you.

Back in your box, Che Guevara!

It would be wrong to single out Paul Kelly for this because elder abuse is always wrong. But Kelly’s think piece on the “existential crisis” facing the Coalition in general and the Liberal Party, in particular, nicely summarises all the dumbest talking points about how young people these days should get off his lawn.

Long story short, young people are socialists now.

Possibly communists.

And women are even worse.

It’s a structural change in the very spacetime fabric of the electorate, which means Peter Dutton will never be Prime Minister. Hugely popular as an all-purpose explainer not just at the Murdoch DeathStar, but throughout the political media, in Kelly’s version, there’s an especially ROFLsome tweak; young people and women are also too smart.

“Australia is becoming a higher education nation and that is working against the Coalition,” Kelly grumbles.

Among people with a tertiary education, Labor’s vote lead over the Coalition was 35-26 per cent. Yet the Coalition’s situation is worse since 18 per cent voted Greens, which means the combined Labor-Greens tertiary vote was 53 per cent. The Liberals are being beaten in the cohort that heavily represents decision-makers and opinion shapers.

It’s probably worth mentioning that the same cohort also used to heavily represent subscribers to The Australian, but that was before Lord Rupert refashioned it as a fanzine for white nationalist authoritarianism, climate change denial and shitposting-as-a-service.

In fact, the werewolf transformation of Kelly’s masthead from a serious broadsheet for pinstriped tax evaders into a dark satanic troll factory is kind of emblematic of what’s actually happening.

It’s not you; it’s them.

In the weird way that you make unexpected connections when thinking about this shit, it was Pink Floyd’s 1983 single, The Gunner’s Dream, that popped into my head when I was trying to figure out why Kelly’s high concept derp landed so uncomfortably. After all, I’ll happily make a big hot meal of a twelve hundred word OpEd explaining why the horror spud is cooked.

I hadn’t thought about that song for decades, but Roger Water’s lyrics about the dream of an RAF airman falling to his death during a raid over Berlin reminded me of how much has changed in our politics. A place to stay and enough to eat used to be table stakes for what Kelly once called the Australain Settlement. Not so much anymore. Not only has there been a massive transfer of wealth from poor and working people to people like, well, Rupert Murdoch, but the machinery of state has been retooled in so many ways to protect the beneficiaries of that transfer. Secret trials? Detention without charge? Mass surveillance?

Yeah, all that’s a thing now.

As is environmental collapse, the corporate capture of regulatory authorities, the criminalisation of dissent, punitive welfare regimes, the performative torture of refugees and generational class warfare.

It’s a lot, innit.

Enough to make you think that perhaps what’s changed isn’t the voters, but the system itself, the power structures and power players, their motives and the outcomes they can manufacture.

Perhaps, what’s happened is that the forty-year-long experiment in shifting the Overton Window of what is considered acceptable policy and discourse further and further to the right has now moved so far into Genghis Khan areas that the poor old peasants on the ground have finally had enough.

In this alternative reading of what’s happening to the electorate, Dutton and his Coalition allies still suffer the effects of a profound structural realignment, but it’s not because millions of teens and uppity women suddenly got thirsty in the pants for this guy.

It’s because the Libs have become so fucking reactionary (and the Labor Party so fucking timid) that a growing cohort of voters has decided, based on rational self-interest, that their bullshit policies aren’t good enough.

The outcome is the same, but the explanation very different.

Of course, as the senior political editor of a newspaper that, more than any other, was responsible for driving our national conversation into the howling wastelands of super-maximum derpitude, Paul Kelly probably didn’t think of that, or care to mention it.