Dutton’s nuclear power play is vintage Tony Abbott. Take an obvious, expert-backed solution to an essential…

Dutton’s nuclear power play is vintage Tony Abbott. Take an obvious, expert-backed solution to an essential public service, and turn it into a team sport. By offering political product differentiation. Now it’s energy. /1 #auspol https://t.co/OAFf53egNq https://t.co/u4pFVTtjGE

In both cases the alternative is literally laughable, on any objective measure. Experts will tell all and sundry this is the case. It’s not the point. The objective facts are not what this is about. It’s about team sports. /2

Conservatives understand that to win elections, you need to set up each issue as a binary, no matter how implausible. Many if not most voters are never engaged in the details of any idea. They just back their team. /3

The LNP had no team to put on the field, for renewables. At most it had Don Quixote out there railing at windmills. But it knows not enough voters want no climate action. It needed a way to be for that, without using renewables. /4 https://t.co/tUS8KQE0Fr

Now it has that. Nuclear. Never mind that it’s a ludicrous idea, objectively, for Australia. That’s not the point. Dutton wants to set up a team sport. Voters don’t engage with how realistic ideas are, they want a battle. /5

We’ve been here again just recently, with the referendum. Where a clear majority were both supportive of and disinterested in the details of change. It didn’t matter. Dutton turned it into a team sport. And won handsomely. Abbott won handsomely on the NBN. /6

The clearly stupid idea won. Because popularity politics isn’t about ideas. It’s about being popular. And being popular is about firing people up, energising them. And you do that with team sports. /7

It was done with Covid too. We’re ‘living with’ a pandemic,. Like not putting out bushfires or cleaning up floods. How was that stupidity allowed to happen? Exactly the same playbook. Turn it into team sports. /8

Call the other team ‘Zero Covids’, and create political product differentiation at every point. Masks vs no masks. Call basic quarantine ‘lockdowns’ and debate that in teams. Etc. /9

Populism is just popularity-based politics. Election-based politics. To win at that game, the playbook is ALWAYS the same. Turn it into a sport, between two teams. Reality will fly out the window in the subsequent games. /10

Because it taps into our deepest social instincts, to emulate others, form teams, and then pursue rivalries with other teams. Imitative rivalry Rene Girard called it. We can’t vote our way out of problems. Voting IS the problem. Popularity as a system of governance. /end