New year should be a time for optimism and welcoming in the promise of an opportunity to start afresh. So apologies in advance for being a party pooper but, from the perspective of Canberra and federal politics, it is hard to remember a year that begins with such apprehension.
No, it's not apprehension about the usual soap opera of politics. It's not about who is doing well in the polls, or which political leader might be the target of blood sport.
It's about the sense that something much more significant is happening in the wider world, which is likely to make many of the squabbles and brawls of Australian politics pale into insignificance, and cast others in an entirely new light.
The new year question this apprehension poses – and the resolution it challenges us to consider – is whether in politics and the media we need to be, well, more agile in the way we think about the world; whether we need to re-assess not just the day-to-day of things, but some of the underlying presumptions on which we operate. Whether we need to always challenge ourselves to believe the unbelievable, whether that be the decline of the liberal international order, or the prospect of a recession at home.
Donald Trump's victory in the US election sent shockwaves around the world. But the shock was probably the greatest in the US itself. Commentators, but more so the political establishment itself, even the Republican Party establishment, spent most of last year dismissing the prospects of him winning the candidacy, then of him winning the election.
Once Trump had won, the commentary was full of confident predictions that he hadn't really meant what he said on many policies, that "sensible" people would ultimately be put in place from the establishment who would advise him well and ensure that the normal way of doing things would ultimately prevail.
President-elect defies predictions
Well, Trump has continued to defy all these predictions.
There are two implications that come out of this. One is the scary prospect that he will continue to defy all those predictions. And that means we just don't know where we will end up.
The second implication is less obvious but represents the more fundamental challenge that Trump poses to the way we think about political developments.
It seems it is a feature of human nature that when we are confronted by what seems unbelievable, we just can't process it. We simply dismiss the prospect that it might happen instead of thinking in any clear-eyed fashion about to do if it does.
A friend observed before Christmas that the western world has lived for the past 70 years (at least) seeing the threat to our established order as coming from outside, most notably from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Yet the greatest threat now to our comfortable presumptions about the way things work may come from within. It comes from disillusioned voters across the western world who are voting to overturn the established order as they see it.
The "big ticket" threats might be war between the US and China, a new arms race, or a trade war.
Aggressive posturing
Already the EU at a Council of Europe meeting in December, started repositioning itself on matters military – where it has never really gone before – in the face of the continuing aggressive posturing of Russia but now also in the face of the possible decline of NATO under a Trump presidency.
Of course, there will be no "European Army", officials insist. But countries of the EU are nonetheless setting up networks to operate collectively if they have to.
The threats to the world order might come from the rise and rise of an aggressive Russia led by a strongman with little regard for "democracy". There is anxiety, too, in Beijing that President Xi might decide he's not going to go at the end of his five-year term. And then there is Donald Trump.
The biggest long-term threat he may pose may not ultimately be a "big ticket" war, but war on the institutions and world order on which we have safely presumed we could depend.
What happens to the international trade system, international financial regulation and banking system in a Trump world? What even happens to US institutions such as the Federal Reserve under Trump?
Just one example of these less colourful, but lethal, risks is to the web of regulatory changes to the banking system, post-GFC, designed to stabilise the banking system that could be undone on the basis of some of the President-elect's pronouncements.
What happens if the US doesn't intervene, or even co-operate in dealing with, the next financial crisis, let alone the next diplomatic crisis?
Belief in democracy fades
The headline result from the findings of the latest ANU Australian Election Study, released just before Christmas, was that the belief in democracy of voters in the 2016 election was at record lows.
The question is interpreted to reflect satisfaction with the way the political system works, rather than as the headline question would imply, satisfaction with democracy as part of a multiple choice question of political systems.
The survey doesn't ask about alternative models but one day it might have to. We presume democracy will survive because it seems unthinkable that it wouldn't. Yet democracy is not one amorphous idea but a whole construct of ideas and institutions that support it.
Even if the idea of democracy is not under threat – in fact there is a strong argument that it is working at its strongest in the election results we have seen in the US, in Britain, in Europe – the institutions which have grown up to support it, or at least the relatively smooth running of our lives, around the world do seem to be under threat.
In Liberalism in Retreat in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, Robin Niblett notes that "since 1945, Western policymakers have believed that open markets, democracy and individual human rights would gradually spread across the entire globe. Today, such hopes seem naïve".
The international relations specialist and director of Chatham House notes that "the countries that built the liberal international order are weaker today than they have been for three generations".
"They no longer serve as an example to others of the strength of liberal systems of economic and political governance. Autocratic governments may therefore try to establish an alternative political order, one governed by might rather than international laws and rules."
The greatest risk as 2017 begins is that those laws and rules that are so familiar as to be granted may suddenly disappear. The challenge for our leaders at home will be being prepared to believe the unbelievable.
Laura Tingle is The Australian Financial Review's political editor
