The meteoric rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation in the last twelve months has caught many political commentators by surprise. Notwithstanding the sudden, explosive swell in support for One Nation across the Australian electorate, many accounts of the Hansonian phenomenon have carefully investigated its acute causes. These causes have included global, political shifts in anti-immigration sentiment, the resurgence of the radical right worldwide, and pervasive economic concerns for households. However, this paper argues that the seemingly inexplicable surge in Hanson’s popularity, contextualised as it must be with a right-wing revival over at least the previous decade, equally necessitates an explanation that engages with the long-term, chronic diremptions that are at the heart of liberal democracies, which have sundered societal meaning, belonging and stability.
Engaging deeply with the social thought of late English philosopher Gillian Rose, this paper utilises her concept of the ‘broken middle’ to help explore the unrepairable sunderances that have been infused into Western societies since Kant’s critical philosophy. Rose argues that much of social thought and the realities of modern society have been dominated by the dichotomies and dualities of Kantian thought, which prevents us from recognising and changing the social and political relations that determine us. The paper instead seeks to mobilise Rose’s use of Hegel’s speculative thinking to understand how the dualities of Kantian thought have created illusions within society, and how such illusions have contributed to the conditions that continually allow fascism and fascistic tendencies to fester and thrive.
The paper then attempts to move away from an overly theoretical standpoint to then cautiously relate these diremptions in thought and society to the Hanson phenomenon in Australia, attending especially to the subjectivities of citizens under modern social life and how they are situated within the broken middle of state and civil society, and law and ethics. Finally, the piece argues against abstractly lamenting over the rise of One Nation, as nostalgia for a unity that was never really there, and instead calls for the necessary hard political and theoretical work that must place ourselves as contributing to the violent sundering of such societal diremptions.
