The single-most important thing for a politician is the story. They develop these as a way of signalling who they are and what they stand for, which is exactly why Donald Trump acted the way he did at the weekend. He needed to demonstrate, conclusively, that things are changing; even though it's only been seven days since Barack Obama sat in the Oval Office. And, if a few innocent people get caught up along the way, well, the new president's just made his point all the more forcefully ...
So that's the point to bear in mind when examining what happened. Trump wanted a way of signalling that he's in charge. He needed to effectively demonstrate that the old way of doing things – the liberal consensus that he's promised to brush aside – has dissolved into nothingness. But this is just noise. The vital question now is whether the story Trump's telling will be powerful enough to create its own reality.
Tony Abbott signalled a similar, dramatic challenge to the comfortable liberal order when he ordered asylum-seekers bundled into huge, orange boats and towed back to Indonesia. For a number of reasons, that strategy worked. His narrative, that the steady arrival of a flotsam of humanity on our shores was part of a business model and that he would turn people back, intersected with reality more comfortably than Labor's alternative.
Abbott's problem was that, as time went on, other parts of his story increasingly didn't mesh with the real world and that's why his backbenchers dumped him. His rhetoric quickly span off into a world of his own creation, one with knights and dames and continuing conflict with militant Islam, rather than focusing on dimple governance and creating opportunity for ordinary people to create their own narratives and that's why he had to go.
This is the trouble, now, for Trump. Not the arbitrary capriciousness of, overnight, closing the borders but rather his ability to interweave his actions with a plausible account about how he's managing to positively influence the world. This is the advantage of democracy, because in four years time (only two before the mid-term elections) Trump will face the people. If, in combination, his actions don't make sense, he'll be bundled out too, his stories dismissed as nothing more than "fake news".
Despite what appears to be regular evidence to the contrary every time we look around, people aren't dumb. Well, not over the longer term, anyway. When "fake news" exists it's being created to serve a purpose. In this case it's had a boost because the old narratives no longer seem to accommodate the reality we see around us.
Stories are incredibly important. They form the basis for they way society works; they become the foundation for the way we extract meaning out of life. We weave our own experiences into narratives we hear and these either resonate with us, or they don't. I've always been, for example, in favour of labelling food to make it easy to see how much sugar it contains. David Gillespie, lawyer and father of six, cut excess sugar from his diet, is thriving, and is an advocate of labelling.
Then I heard another David Gillespie entirely, the former gastroenterologist now Assistant Health Minister, on the radio. He insisted everyone should stick to the outside aisles of the supermarket and buy fresh fruit and veggies. Both are probably right, but the key is that the Minister's given me an easily implemented strategy. It's simple. He empowered me to decide for myself. I'm doing that and I've already lost (some) weight. The media offers politicians a megaphone, and that's why the stories politicians tell us are so important.
Last week another National, Barnaby Joyce, tried a different tack. Faced with concerns about the inclusiveness of Australia Day he lashed out, telling people (including a former cabinet colleague) to "crawl under a rock". Joyce's stupidity is not so much intellectual as political. Just like Hillary Clinton's dismissive comment about the "deplorables", he's left nowhere for legitimate discussion. A clever politician might have insisted we can have Australia Day and be aware; Australia Day and a day for reconciliation. Joyce just isn't that smart.
At some point reality will intrude on every story. It's happening to globalisation now. This used to be seen as an unalloyed good. Today we know better and it's turned out that this was just a myth being pedalled enthusiastically by those benefiting from our current economic settings. What's dead is the old, comfortable, political liberal consensus that dominated the west. The challenge for politicians is to uncover new narratives that can to bind us to their own particular projects.
Trump's managed to do that for now, but it won't be long before he faces a reckoning. Aside from causing short-term chaos at the border, it's very difficult to see exactly what his travel bans will accomplish or how they will contribute to "keeping America great". The trouble for Trump is that as soon as the mis-match between his preferred version of the facts and the reality becomes too great, people will turn the venom he's engendering back on him. With interest.
Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.