Its internal inadequacies mean the worst state Labor government in the country may be re-elected for a fourth term, not because it commands any real voter support but because the alternative has even less.

That the Liberal Party failed to win the last state election, in 2022, against a government that had turned Melbourne into the most locked-down city in the world showed almost epic ineptitude.

But intimidated by premier Daniel Andrews and plagued by factional wars, the Liberals thought their best plan was to out-Labor Labor with a leader, in Matthew Guy, whom voters had already comprehensively rejected in 2019.

Predictably, offered a choice between an oppressive and incompetent Labor government and a Liberal opposition aping it, voters stuck with the devil they knew.

If anything, since then it has got even worse. The Liberals have had a further three leaders in the past 12 months.

Plus almost no policy other than the no-brainers to repeal the emergency services levy, which taxes farmers for the volunteer firefighting they mostly do themselves, and to repeal the Victorian version of the voice — the federal version of which Victorian voters rejected 54-46 at the 2023 referendum (but which, earlier, state Liberals had supported).

Despite this, the Labor government’s travails - the latest being its complicity in CFMEU corruption claims that have added perhaps $15bn to the cost of its much-hyped Big Build - mean the Libs are now just marginally ahead in the polls.

Not by enough to be confident of the 7%-plus two-party-preferred swing needed to win, yet by enough to know that if only they could avoid making themselves the issue they might finally fall over the line.

But that was then, this is now, and two things have hit them hard: the inexorable rise of One Nation and the Moira Deeming preselection debacle which, given the fight they have to win 16 seats, is an extraordinary act of self-harm.

Deeming is the upper house Liberal MP who helped to organise a women’s rights rally in 2023 that was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis; who was accused by her then leader, John Pesutto, of herself being a neo-Nazi sympathiser; who was subsequently expelled from the Liberal partyroom, only successfully to sue Pesutto for defamation; and who was then readmitted to the partyroom and promoted — only to be beaten last weekend for preselection by a serial candidate accused of ethnic branch-stacking.

Who was then dumped as the endorsed candidate himself for giving a convicted pedophile a glowing pre-sentence personal reference despite knowing what it was for and subsequently denying that he'd done so.

You cannot make this stuff up, can you?

There are recent precedents where head office has simply endorsed candidates, but instead of doing this with Deeming ∼beaten by someone who should never have been allowed to run ∼ the Victorian Liberal Party has now called for a fresh preselection with nominations to close at noon on Thursday.

Already, moderates are hitting the phones to marshal the ousted Dinesh Gourisetty’s bloc of votes against Deeming, so it is hard to see that she will face a fair fight. Gourisetty, it should be noted, donated to Pesutto’s legal defence, as disclosed in the latest parliamentary returns (as did Heath Williams and former MP Louise Staley, who both publicly abused Deeming online this week).

Right now, Deeming is considering her position, unsure whether to give the Libs one last chance to treat her fairly or to walk, perhaps to join One Nation, a party that would welcome her with open arms, as a conservative woman who has become a hero to everyone who thinks trans rights should not trump women’s rights.

But apart from the preselection, there’s another related but even more troubling issue arising from the whole Deeming saga; namely the Liberal Party’s decision to bankroll the legal costs awarded against Pesutto last year by the Federal Court, costs that he'd previously said would be covered by donors who are, as yet, anonymous but who are refusing to pony up for their mate.

It’s said by those senior Liberals challenging the party’s decision to lend Pesutto the $1.5m he owes Deeming (and thereby to stave off bankruptcy and expulsion from the parliament) that the state party president, Phil Davis, refused to provide state executive with details of the Pesutto loan agreement, any advice about its legality or the names of Pesutto’s supposed guarantors before ramming it through on factional numbers.

It’s thought that the discovery process in this case could expose more factional skulduggery, hence there’s an attempt to delay further hearings until after November’s state election.

Ponder this. The Liberal woman who won a court case over appalling treatment by a Liberal man is turfed out, whereas the Liberal man who lost is given millions out of party coffers to save his skin and gets preselected without a contest. And these clowns wonder why they have a problem with women?

It is no wonder there’s now a formal motion from state executive member Colleen Harkin calling on Davis and his state party vice-presidents to resign, as well as a Change.Org petition from rank-and-file Liberals demanding he go.

Add in the now serious demands for federal intervention and you can readily see that the Liberals have no chance of a November win unless this is resolved.

Under the Liberal Party’s federal constitution, the federal executive can intervene in the affairs of a state division if it is unable or unwilling to perform its functions or if its conduct is seriously detrimental to the interests of the party".

Although this threshold has surely been met, given factional divisions on the federal executive, talk that 80-year-old federal president John Olsen wants to retire and the relatively fragile positions of both the state and federal parliamentary leadership, the appetite for intervention is unclear.

What is clear, though, is that One Nation poll numbers in Victoria are surging and, as SA shows, that would mean a win for Labor.

If the Liberals don't remove the Allan government, on top of all their other recent failures, the party’s doom spiral would be cemented.

Without decisive action, what has been the most successful political party in Australian history, like its predecessors the Nationalist Party and the United Australia Party, could itself be passing into history.

Yet the family resemblance is real. For it was the long 18th century’s great philosophers who advanced one of modernity’s most consequential wagers: that interests would subdue passions. If human beings could be induced to pursue their interests rather than defend dogmas and chase glory, conflict itself might be domesticated — shifted from the battlefield to the bargaining table.

This was, in other words, the intellectual origin of the art of the deal: the belief that, in the end, every actor has a price, and that rational self-interest will draw antagonists toward compromise. Strangely, the 19th and 20th centuries ∼ whose wars grew ever more destructive ∼ did not abandon that conviction but entrenched it, even as the evidence mounted that it obscured more than it revealed.

The intellectual genealogy, too complex to detail here, runs from the early modern rehabilitation of self-interest to Mar-a-Lago on the Gaza shore — but the crucial moment lies in Duc Henri de Rohan’s 1638 distinction between passion, grounded in impulse, and interest, grounded in calculation. His maxim, rendered in English as interest will not lie, eventually became, in JA Gunn’s phrase, the most fashionable political concept in the 17th century.

Passion, irrationality and barbarism

Interests, Rohan maintained, were stable, reasonable and predictable. Passions, by contrast, connoted volatility, irrationality and barbarism. The genius of the moderns was to transform conflicts over values into conflicts over interests — interests that could be divided, negotiated and settled.

What gave this idea its force was the rise of commerce, the domain of calculation par excellence. A powerful chain of reasoning followed: a commercial society would cultivate habits of calculative rationality; those habits would permeate social norms and expectations, and; over time, coolly defined interests would supplant tempestuous passions. The result would not be the disappearance of conflict but its intelligent management: regularised, negotiated and, above all, contained.

Montesquieu coined that proposition’s most celebrated formulation in 1748. The natural effect of commerce, he wrote in The Spirit of the Laws, is to bring about peace. Two nations which trade together render themselves reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling. In this way, the spirit of commerce unites nations.

More ambitiously still, commerce offers a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for, wherever there is commerce, there we meet with agreeable manners — the mild (doux) habits that sustain contracts between traders and agreements between states.

Science plays a part

In Montesquieu’s thought, this tendency had a providential cast. The 19th and 20th centuries translated it into a secular idiom. It was no longer commerce alone that would inculcate rationality but the expanding authority of science and, even more, of complex technology — domains whose effective operation seemed to require disciplined, instrumentally rational thought. Although rarely stated so baldly, much of the modernisation literature of the 1950s and 1960s implied a simple syllogism: anyone capable of building missiles must reason as the boffins in Langley do — and, sooner or later, will act with similar calculative restraint in both conflict and co-operation.

The consequence was that fanaticism ∼ what David Hume called enthusiasm ∼ would gradually recede. Hume argued that disputes from interest are the most reasonable and the most excusable, precisely because they admit of bargained resolution; those of religion, by contrast, are more furious and enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest.

But the extinction of enthusiasm did not require religion’s disappearance. It was, said Alexis de Tocqueville, enough that religion evolve toward forms that reinforced the mundane virtues of co-operation, moderation, tolerance and self-mastery. And that, the modernisation theorists believed, was precisely the direction the major faiths would take in technologically savvy societies.

Inflaming not taming

Clifford Geertz cast doubt on that optimism. In Islam Observed (1968), synthesising years of fieldwork in Morocco and Indonesia, he argued that modernisation ∼ and the spread of education ∼ could inflame rather than tame religious extremism.

Minds trained to prize analytical coherence had, in his experience, recoiled from the tolerant syncretism of Moroccan Sufism and from Indonesia’s gentle blend of Islam, Hinduism and animism, turning instead toward more rigorous, purified and uncompromising forms of faith.

It was therefore no accident that, as Albert Hourani observed in Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (1983), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani anticipated later currents of Islamic fundamentalism, despite being one of the 19th century’s most influential Muslim advocates of science and technology. If someone asks: why are Muslims in retreat?, wrote al-Afghani, I will answer: when they were truly Muslims, the world bore witness to their excellence. Nor was it accidental that several of the September 11 terrorists were highly trained engineers.

Hasten the apocalypse

Technical mastery did not inevitably advance the spirit of bargaining and moderation. On the contrary, the ability to build missiles could give zealots the means to hasten the apocalypse, dismember the infidels and honour a compact not with other men but with God — a compact that admits neither compromise nor restraint. Utterly irrational ends could be pursued by eminently rational means.

That conjunction ∼ technical sophistication in the service of fanaticism ∼ is the Iranian regime in miniature. That does not mean the regime will never enter into agreements. But, following the precedent set by the Prophet Muhammad at the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, any such agreement is a hudna or temporary armistice at best, a fleeting ceasefire at worst, to be systematically violated whenever possible, and openly repudiated as soon as practicable.

Far from vindicating the Enlightenment’s hopes, those agreements show how readily fanatics can advance their cause by exploiting the West’s illusions, knowing that it lacks the stomach for a prolonged fight. And to make things worse, the agreements' record is a miserably poor one. As John Stuart Mill ∼ whom no one could plausibly accuse of warmongering ∼ warned, the lesson of the centuries is that barbarians cannot be depended on for observing any rules, nor to reciprocate concessions.

Compromises and capitulations

Time and again, the tiny seed the Due de Rohan planted has therefore borne bitter fruit, as striking deals with fanatics becomes, all too often, an excuse for compromises that turn out to be capitulations.

Yet the art of the deal and the confidence that every conflict is merely a high-stakes version of a real estate negotiation, has a magnetic hold on the Western mind — and on few minds is its grip firmer than on that of America’s 47th president. That his negotiators with Iran have been commercial deal-makers, not hardened experts in handling rogue regimes, should therefore come as no surprise.

Yes, as they look down from on high, Voltaire, Hume and Kant may shake their heads in disbelief. But this much is undeniable: Donald J. Trump is the Enlightenment’s bastard son.