The Liberals’ talk of “renewal” looks less like reform than ritual – invoking origins to avoid confronting decline. The real lesson is not about personalities, but how power loses legitimacy when it drifts from reality.

Politicians, the media, and the nation have spent nine months debating the sharpest disintegration in Australia’s living memory: the unravelling of Menzies’ party. The Liberals have reached for an old talisman. ‘Rebuilding’, in Sussan Ley’s program, meant becoming ‘future-oriented’ by returning to their roots: reanimating the “party of Menzies.”

In doing so, the party declared progress would be guaranteed by regress. That is not a normal chain of reasoning – its the logic of secular religion: a founder venerated as prophet, a promised return of certainty to the faithful, a real failure re-branded as a lapse in belief. When political tradition stops revitalising itself through understanding reality, it survives by ritual: exhuming antique ideals long after the conditions that made them desirable have vanished.

Not only in Australia, but across the Atlantic world, ‘moderates’ learned to speak as if their civilisation and ideals were laws of nature. They spoke as if there were no alternative to an order that took hold in the West from the mid-1970s (and the post-1991 East) until the ‘End of History’ became an unquestionable truth.

The point is not that this was a myth, but that it became habit: a refusal to name decline as decline until denial draped itself in the attire of divine principle.

Ideologies rarely collapse because their predictions fail. They persist by metabolising failure without surrendering authority. When the defended system stagnates, fractures, or collapses, the faithful rarely revise the doctrine; they intensify it. Breakdown can resemble catatonia: the mind refuses to accept that the order itself is sick, because it has become part of one’s sense of reason and morality. From the outside it looks like stubbornness; inside, it constitutes an incapability of thinking beyond doctrine.

In Australia, that habit of thought has converged with a more immediate fact. The parliamentary Liberal Party no longer contains the internal discipline or confidence that once made it formidable. Its old strongmen are gone – only the mediocrities remain: background players before the crisis years, now the inheritors of the mantle. They have learned the performances of authority faster than the practice of it. That is why the party’s collapse, and its talk of ‘restoration’, feel less like renewal than superstition.

This is the context in which Angus Taylor is being sold as both restoration and reinvention. Yet the project is hard to distinguish from the template the party has followed for decades: cultural hardness, economic reflex, and a rough moralism that substitutes for a governing idea. The same strategy too: promise change but deliver continuity. The “values” invoked to justify the coup have disembowelled the meaning of “renewal.” In an ‘End of History’ world there is no real past, so stagnation becomes indistinguishable from renewal. Once history is treated as optional, power gains a privilege: it can repeat itself without confession, because there is no memory against which to measure it.

The most revealing moments are often small ones, because they are unguarded. Take the “Fantastic. Good move. Well done, Angus” blunder. It wasn’t scandalous, but it still matters. Caught trying to manufacture an appearance of approval, Taylor’s next move was not admission and apology, but an attempt to reframe it as a “simple mistake” of administration – not a lie, just a routine error.

That incident may seem trivial, but its a symptom of a warped political culture: one in which power can be won by actors who treat obligations as suggestions, and mistake parliamentary professionalism for deception. In this style of politics, advisers and media staff endeavour to present the politician as the embodiment of ‘old’, ’natural’, ’timeless’ values by concealing flaws and embellishing insignificant details.

Once you treat principles as timeless, the rules of democracy become adjustable, dialled up or down when it suits you. The result is a resort to pseudo-populist tactics, where image matters more than the hard work of reducing pressures that can turn stability into division, or division into violence.

Still, the coverage has narrowed to the wrong questions. What will Taylor do? Can he stop the plummet? Those are media’s questions, because they fit the daily news cycle. The deeper question is: what the should Labor Party learn from watching the opposition shatter? Not because Labor should copy tactics, but because collapse exposes realities that are usually hidden.

What should Labor study? Two things above all: power and legitimacy. Power is not just the ability to win elections, pass bills, or dominate the news cycle. It is the capacity to build a governing bloc, bind factions to a common purpose, and keep your story tethered to realities. Legitimacy is not mere popularity. It is the shared sense that authority is warranted, that competence is real, and that public action sits within an acceptable moral order.

Labor’s vulnerability is to treat this as spectacle rather than warning. When an opposition cannot govern, a government may mistake survival for success; yet the forces that hollowed out the centre-right could reach any party: drifting from reality into ritual, mistaking administration for authority, and treating legitimacy as a possession rather than an outcome.

The Liberals are not only losing votes; they are letting the machine that turns ideals into authority shatter. Their rivalries are no longer contained by a persuasive mission. Their language is no longer anchored in conditions that can make their arguments sound ’true’. They are trying to reverse decay by invoking origins, as though genealogy could substitute for justification.

The lesson is not to obsess over Taylor. It is to study what his rise represents: a political class trying to solve structural weakness with flimsy rhetoric. If Labor wants to avoid that fate, it must think less about personalities and more about the conditions that determine whether a party will be a coherent force or a hollow religion.

Power without legitimacy becomes coercion dressed as governance. Legitimacy without power becomes virtue without effect. The task is to keep them joined: to close the ruinous gap before becoming accustomed to it, or accepting it as inevitable.