An ‘inflexion point’ is a point of no-return. You pass it unnoticed, seeing the pivot only in hindsight, perplexed when past performance stops being predictive of future outcomes.
So, yeah, mostly a bad thing.
Western society experienced an inflexion point sometime in the past twenty years. Smart observers point to Donald Trump 2016 as evidence of this — as a symptom, not the cause.
DJT the disruptor, with his apoplectic rants against strawmen both foreign and domestic, serves no clear purpose except to seemingly usurp democracy.
The walking headline is responsible for false-flag operations, emergency declarations, the casual abandonment of international partners.
Democracy as we know it is exploding, but its also exploding in his hands. Trump believes the US shouldn’t even have midterms, hoping to avoid the shrapnel, but his mistake was throwing the pin, not the grenade.
Will it blow up in his face? What if (in the words of Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame) Trump rejects your reality and substitutes his own?
He tried in 2020 and only narrowly failed.
Just to deepen my suspicion (that ABC News is somehow spying one me) the byline today is ‘America’s inflection point’ quoting Time Walz, governor of Minnesota. It makes me wonder what inflection point in German history presaged the Third Reich, a moot point when you consider what followed.
Anyway, here in Australia we’re in the pivot.
Our ruling progressives are charting a centrist path, so the conservatives have lurched further right in a frantic rebranding exercise, their downhill race described by Treasurer Jim Chalmers as “chasing a paler shade of orange”.
With our government pushing through hate-crime legislation and tighter gun-control laws, the omnibus legislation fractured the Coalition into warring camps.
It’s in this bloodbath that the inflexion point lies. Our chance to stop following that trail of orange breadcrumbs is now or never. Or hot chips, or whatever it was.
In my post “the pillowbiters” I predicted conservative politicians will either become Independents or defect to One Nation, depending where on the spectrum they lie.
But I also fantasized a third option: that centre-right conservatives might join with the “teal” Independents and form a new party.
The strongest challenge to Labor won’t come from farmers and fascists but from savvy urban professionals attuned to the drumbeat of the city.
Both major parties have been bleeding support for decades. In a land of compulsory voting, where else can they go, except to the Independents?
If #3 doesn’t happen then Labor will be in power for a generation, and that’s not good for democracy.
Either way, I’ll just sit back and enjoy the carnage, eat my popcorn, and make sure none of that orange shit splashes onto me.