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Michael Rainsborough
Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra.
The recent controversy over whether the radical right-wing firebrand Nick Fuentes should have been interviewed on several major podcasts – and, if so, on what terms and with what degree of ritualised disapproval – offered a revealing snapshot of the prevailing political and media temper. For weeks, before President Donald Trump’s moves on Venezuela abruptly upended the news cycle, a great deal of attention revolved around questions of platforming and whether adequate distance had been publicly established from his overtly antisemitic (and other unsavoury) views.
The controversy was instructive insofar as it revealed the register in which much contemporary political discussion now unfolds. In arguments over whether Fuentes should have been interviewed at all, and how aggressively he ought to have been challenged, extraordinary care was lavished on language, posture and symbolic propriety: the extent to which the interviewer had pushed back, the clarity of moral separation and the visible performance of the appropriate rituals of disavowal.
By contrast, far less attention was devoted to the task of assessing why figures like Fuentes command an audience in the first place, what conditions sustain their appeal, or what their growing visibility might disclose about the political environment in which they operate. This imbalance is unlikely to admit of a single explanation, but it does, to my mind, point toward a broader unease with explanation itself.
Asking why – why a particular individual or movement attracts support, why institutions persistently falter, why legitimacy frays – is increasingly regarded as a hazardous undertaking, one requiring advance disclaimers and careful moral choreography. The preference, instead, is for signalling over scrutiny, for procedural rectitude as a substitute for inquiry, and for the policing of manners in place of sustained engagement with underlying forces.
The authority of explanation has not vanished, but its standing has altered. Rather than pursued confidently, it is often approached cautiously, hedged with caveats and evaluated primarily for its implications rather than for its capacity to illuminate. The result is a form of discourse that remains intensely alert to offence and pre-emptive reassurance yet is repeatedly caught unprepared when political realities assert themselves in ways that established vocabularies struggle to anticipate.
Across media debate, academic practice and policy formation, a consistent tendency has become visible. As explanation gives way to performance, the effects are tangible: intellectual constriction, strategic surprise and a style of governance that is energetic yet curiously shallow.
What is exposed here is a defining paradox of the political moment itself. An ever more elaborate machinery has arisen for talking around contentious phenomena, while a deep and increasingly institutionalised reluctance has taken hold when it comes to asking what they are, where they come from or what they signify. The result is not simply misunderstanding or uncertainty, but a politics organised around a quiet, resolute determination not to know.
Explanation and its Discontents
In earlier academic and policy traditions, explanation conventionally preceded evaluation. To explain a phenomenon was not to endorse it, but to render it intelligible. This reflected an ordinary professional expectation: that analysis should clarify causes before judgements were exercised or remedies proposed.
That ordering has weakened. Explanation is now more readily confounded with implication. To describe causes is taken to gesture sympathy; to analyse the appeal of something is suspected of wishing to confer legitimacy upon it or even to actualise it. The paradox, seldom acknowledged, is that the more disruptive or unsettling the phenomenon, the stronger the pressure to avert one’s gaze from understanding it.
This shift is rarely articulated. It operates tacitly, through atmospheres, incentives and reputational cues. Some questions attract approval; others provoke visible unease. Over time, inquiry adapts. Curiosity narrows, not through formal prohibition, but through a learned sense of discretion.
The effect is cumulative. What begins as caution settles into habit and eventually disposition. Explanation is not rejected outright, but handled carefully, as one might handle an object known to draw unwelcome attention. The result is a style of debate in which events are framed primarily as moral puzzles – who failed, who offended, which norms were breached – rather than as outcomes requiring sustained causal analysis. Condemnation and reassurance take precedence over diagnosis.
Platforming, Pushback and the Eclipse of Inquiry
The storm surrounding the interviews with Fuentes offered a clear demonstration of how contemporary argument gravitates toward manners and decorum rather than explanation. Much of the clamour was seldom about the coherence of what was said but more about the propriety of whether the interviews had displayed the correct mixture of hostility, distance and visible disapproval.
Tucker Carlson’s encounter with Fuentes drew particular criticism. A range of conservative figures, like Ben Shapiro and senior Republican office-holders such as House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator Ted Cruz, condemned the interview as insufficiently adversarial, arguing that Fuentes was permitted to speak at length without sustained challenge. For many, the objection was to grant Fuentes airtime all. The concern, in other words, was less about whether the interview clarified anything of substance, but whether it transgressed the informal rules governing who may be heard in public discourse and under what conditions.
Piers Morgan’s subsequent interview with Fuentes, widely discussed precisely because it was far more confrontational, reproduced the same dynamic in a different form. Morgan’s hostility left little ambiguity about his own position, satisfying prevailing expectations of decency and moral correctness. Yet much of the reaction, particularly outside mainstream commentary, was less impressed. The exchange was widely judged to have generated more heat than light. In practice, Fuentes frequently evaded Morgan’s framing, using provocation and taboo-breaking to seize control of the interaction, generating a spectacle rather than insight.
It was in the commentary surrounding Morgan’s interview that the substitution of manners for explanation became most visible. Discussion focused less on whether the exchange had elucidated anything about Fuentes’s appeal, the conditions that sustain it or the audiences to which it speaks, than on whether the acceptable moral boundaries had been observed. Within the interview itself, Morgan introduced a pre-recorded clip of conservative pundit Danny Finkelstein, who invoked the horrors of his family’s experience of Nazism. The clip functioned not as an argument to be examined but as a boundary marker seeking to place Fuentes beyond the pale and, in doing so, pre-empting any deeper interrogation of his position. The episode illustrated the dynamic: moral positioning displacing analytical inquiry and the optics of condemnation taking precedence over the harder question of why such figures command attention at all.
Equally revealing were the subsequent exchanges between Finkelstein and the articulate conservative-traditionalist commentator Connor Tomlinson. Tomlinson sought to do the unfashionable thing and account for the popularity of Fuentes, suggesting that his appeal lay in his ability to translate grievance into the language of collective identity, particularly among younger, politically disaffected, white men.
In a political environment saturated with group-based claims, symbolic recognition and identity-centred mobilisation, Fuentes had grasped, Tomlinson noted, that the grammar of identity politics is not confined to progressive movements. This was not a defence of Fuentes’s views but an observation about political competition under contemporary conditions: when politics is organised around identity, actors who successfully articulate an identity narrative will attract followers, including those who feel excluded from dominant moral frameworks.
Rather than engaging with Tomlinson’s accounting on its merits – assessing whether it captured something real about audience formation and mobilisation – Finkelstein’s responses repeatedly pivoted toward the moral status of the explainer, worked less to refute Tomlinson’s account than to relocate Tomlinson himself, pressing him toward the role of apologist or covert sympathiser. The familiar accusation followed: that explanation amounted to endorsement and moral contamination.
This manoeuvre captures the broader pattern this essay is concerned with. Explanation is positioned as the greater hazard – accusation becomes the safer virtue. The operative question is no longer ‘Is this account accurate, partial or flawed?’ but ‘What does offering this account say about you?’ Analysis gives way to moral sorting and inquiry loses priority altogether.
The result is a discourse dense with boundary-marking and thin on understanding. Rituals of distance are performed while questions of causality remain largely untouched. What might have been an opportunity to dissect how identity, grievance and political communication interact is instead reduced to a debate over tone, intent and propriety – a form of argument that flatters its participants with moral seriousness while leaving the underlying forces undisturbed.
Deflection Politics
Once explanation acquires this moral charge, avoidance ceases to be incidental and becomes a learned response. Observers learn which questions attract suspicion, institutions learn which accounts generate risk, and public debate quietly reorganises itself around safer forms of commentary. The effect is displacement, as attention is redirected away from causes that might unsettle prevailing assumptions.
Twenty years ago, the late David Martin Jones and I identified a pattern in academic and policy discourse: a refusal to acknowledge the ideological motivation animating jihadist movements. We argued that this was symptomatic of a deeper official malaise, namely, not wanting to know your enemy, which remains the surest harbinger of bad strategy (an insight which, like so many others, disappeared without trace). Instead, explanatory emphasis migrated toward an ever-expanding constellation of secondary factors – social exclusion, marginalisation, foreign-policy grievance, mental health – each potentially relevant in isolation but collectively performing a quite different strategic function.
That function is deflection.
By locating causality primarily in social pathology or structural disadvantage, public discourse was able to preserve a reassuring image of liberal societies as fundamentally benign. Violence was represented more as something that happened to people, rather than something people did for intelligible reasons grounded in belief, doctrine and moral commitment. In a world of secular modernity, politico-religious motivation was an embarrassment – and, if acknowledged at all, was translated into a problem of ‘inclusion’ and provision, solvable by ‘more youth clubs’, where budding young Islamists might stave off the call to jihad with endless games of ping-pong.
The consequences of this evasion are now becoming evident. Policies that dismissed non-liberal ideologies as epiphenomenal struggled to anticipate behaviour, counter recruitment or disrupt mobilisation. Intervention focused on symptoms rather than ideological motivations. When violence persisted, it was framed – yet again– as an inexplicable eruption, entirely unrepresentative of communal opinion and carefully disconnected from the belief systems that had organised it.
What is on display here is a distinctive mode of public reasoning. It was visible as events unfolded and sometimes remarked upon at the time. After Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels, Manchester and so on, jihadist attacks were followed not by sober engagement but by a familiar sequence of shock, condemnation and symbolic reassurance. Political leaders urged unity, publics were prompted not to ‘look back in anger‘, candles were lit, teddy bears were hugged and attention was steered firmly away from questions of causation.
The effect was insulation through managed ignorance. By treating each attack as an isolated rupture – morally outrageous but analytically disconnected – institutions avoided confronting the consistency of what they were facing. Strategic surprise, in this sense, reflected not a lack of warning, but a settled preference within authority to not want to know.
Populism and the Refusal of Causality
Many institutional responses to populist politics reflected this preference. The politics of not wanting to know meant the political elite experienced unanticipated electoral outcomes such as Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the advance of sovereigntist parties across Europe as shocks to the system, despite the fact that the drivers of voter alienation had long been visible to anyone willing to look: economic dislocation, institutional drift, cultural estrangement and the steady erosion of political trust.
Yet even after these outcomes, this reluctance did not give way to explanation. Instead, they were attributed to misinformation, foreign interference or voter irrationality rather than the culmination of observable trends. Fact-checking operations expanded, attempts at information management multiplied and elections came to be regarded as problems of perception rather conditions to be examined. In effect, rather than explaining anything, these events were explained away.
Manners as Low-Risk Governance
As explanation recedes, manners expand. Language, tone and affective alignment acquire an exaggerated importance, not because they clarify outcomes, but because they are easier to manage. Speaking correctly becomes a surrogate for governing competently; failures are reframed as lapses of communication rather than errors of judgement, which reinforces the idea that better messaging, tighter regulation and improved informational hygiene will somehow restore equilibrium.
The problem is, if we concentrate on the uses of language, we are in danger of taking our discoveries about manners of speaking as answers to questions about what is there. ‘Correct’ language, in this context, is pressed into service not merely as a description of reality but as a substitute for engaging it – a move long associated with administrative systems that privilege what is legible, standardisable and reputationally safe over what is substantively effective.
This substitution has obvious attractions. Manners are safer than diagnosis. They offer comfort where causes are complex and reassurance where outcomes disappoint. They also travel well across institutions, translating easily into guidelines, training modules, codes of conduct and statements of principle. They create the appearance of responsiveness without confronting underlying structural forces and tensions. As a result, organisational energy is channelled toward tone management and procedural display rather than toward the riskier task of revisiting assumptions. This pattern is particularly notable in contemporary systems of public administration concerned with blame avoidance and reputational control.
What they do not yield is learning. When policies fail or produce unintended effects, the response is rarely to question first principles. Instead, rhetoric intensifies: messaging is refined, language policed more closely and procedural correctness reaffirmed. The problem is presumed to lie not in what was done, but in how it was said. In this sense, governance becomes increasingly adept at managing its own presentation while remaining curiously insulated from feedback.
The result is managerialist governance that is active but shallow – busy, expressive and administratively confident, yet largely unresponsive to the conditions beneath the surface it so carefully seeks to manage.
Institutions That Learn Not to See
Over time, avoidance settles into institutional routine. Media organisations learn which questions generate friction and which pass without incident. Universities factor reputational risk into research agendas and hiring decisions. Policy environments reward reassurance over realism. None of this requires coordination or instruction: it emerges through incentives, career calculation and the calibration of risk.
The consequence is institutional myopia. Problems remain visible only so long as they can be managed symbolically – through statements, frameworks and procedural response. Once they exceed that threshold, they are reframed as sudden crises rather than as the cumulative result of long-standing neglect. This tendency to manage risk performatively, while deferring engagement with underlying causes, is a characteristic of the modern ‘risk society’.
At that point, surprise appears to have become an ingrained institutional stance. Prior warnings are rediscovered retrospectively, signals once discounted are recast as having been invisible, and failure is narrated as misfortune rather than misjudgement. This is not a failure of intelligence, but of attention: an environment in which seeing clearly carries more risk than looking away.
Policy Without Explanation
When explanation is regarded as a liability, policy becomes untethered. Decisions continue to be taken, resources allocated and frameworks announced, but the relationship between means and ends weakens. Recent experience supplies ample illustration: pandemic responses driven by model outputs divorced from behavioural assumptions; counter-extremism strategies focused on messaging rather than extant threats driven by politico-religious motivation; immigration systems promising control while manifestly failing to deliver it; climate policy organised around Net Zero targets with costs, sequencing and trade-offs deferred.
In such conditions, abstraction replaces diagnosis. Buzzwords like resilience, inclusion and cohesion circulate freely across policy documents and ministerial statements, providing a language of assurance without explanatory force. When outcomes disappoint, assumptions are not revisited. Language is refined, guidance updated and commitments restated with greater intensity. Failure is interpreted as a problem of execution or communication rather than of initial understanding.
The result is not simply delay, but a systematic aversion to learning itself. Feedback is softened, signals attenuated and correction deferred until circumstances impose themselves from outside. Correction, when it finally arrives, does so under crisis conditions rather than through deliberate review – late, costly and with fewer options than were once available. Policy thus proceeds in a condition of managed unknowing, sustained by the hope that reckoning can always be postponed.
Explanation as Reckoning
Explanation does not promise control, consensus or redemption. It clarifies constraints rather than dissolving them and exposes trade-offs rather than harmonising values. For institutions invested in projecting competence and momentum, this is deeply uncomfortable. Avoidance, however, does not neutralise consequences. Political, economic and social forces continue to operate whether they are acknowledged or not.
In such conditions, civility and restraint have their place but they cannot substitute for account-giving. Courtesy may ease conversation; explanation determines whether reality is faced at all. When the two come into tension, it is explanation, not manners, that constitutes the primary intellectual obligation: the duty to make forces legible, assumptions explicit and limits visible, even where this unsettles established narratives or polite consensus.
In this sense, explanation functions not as a guide to action but as a reckoning. It records what was intelligible before it became inescapable – and what might have been addressed while discretion still existed. The politics of not wanting to know offers reassurance and moral absolution. Explanation offers neither. What it offers instead is recognition – and the choice of whether to face it early or pay for it later.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
