Let’s be clear from the outset. Senator-elect Ricky Muir has as much business being in Parliament as ­­­­I do a good procedural understanding of how he got there.  He is nothing if not history’s most compelling case to vote below the line. To defend, as some have done following a ridiculous interview with Mike Willesee last weekend, Muir’s suitability to the Senate as though it were a hard-won right and not, in fact, a curious electoral accident is spurious. But to see his rapidly unfolding “people power” story chiefly as a crisis of preferential voting ignores the ongoing crisis in modernity and politics itself.

If you did not see the Sunday Night, interview, I cannot recommend the experience. It’s a depressing instant in which a journalist with an average record and a politician with a questionable future meet to consciously reveal a shared personal revulsion and unconsciously reveal the rapid decline of their respective institutions. If there were a winner in this early wake for late modernism, it was Muir. He was the guy not even pretending to play the stupid game.

Perhaps the memories of political journalists have to be short in order for them to forget the fact of their diminishing importance. It might be so. Certainly, in the “analysis” of the Willesee-Muir interview, media providers appear to have forgotten their culpability in the matter of Pauline Hanson.

When Hanson made a maiden speech beset by grammatical and factual error, the press delighted. When Hanson failed to recognise a word most Australians would not recognise, the press delighted. And Australians learnt to hate the press and learned to love Pauline. It was less Pauline’s charm than it was the distaste by political and media orthodoxies that turned her from an idiot of mild significance into a People’s Princess.

It is not surprise that Hanson has reached out to the Motoring Enthusiast. “I’m telling the media to back off and leave him alone,” she said. This command will only function, as Hanson might know well, to incite interest in the accidental politician. Muir’s birth by disapproval might be violent and uncomfortable, but it will, as Hanson can remember, be significant. Nothing like a paternalistic enemy to make you seem like a glorious rebel child.

In the interview, Willesee is the near-dead body of modernity. What he does in “revealing” the naivete of his subject is less “gotcha” than “gimme”. To “call out” the ignorance of a man elected with a record-low primary is every bit as brave, necessary and difficult as microwave popcorn. This is a moment of false enlightenment whose results were as unexpected as Friday following Thursday. Or rather, about as surprising as the “reveal” in the final episode of a home renovation show. We all know what it’s going to look like. We watch anyway, less for the “surprise” than the comforting impression that there can no longer be any surprises at all.

After the Sunday “reality” special, it’s as if someone has taken a dump in a hardwood corner of a reality renovation show and given it its own spin-off. Last week, Muir was a quietly stinking embarrassment. This week, he is a threat to the foundation of order. Just like Pauline and just like Clive Palmer.

Hanson and Palmer have jumped to Muir’s defence, but they need not have. It was enough for the incumbent to look critically benighted. His sheer inability to form words or take a genuine interest in the political process he will soon be well-paid to misunderstand is its own defence.

There is no discernible “real” remaining in conventional politics. The ALP has long since abandoned pursuit of a spontaneous real and looks like what it is: a charade managed poorly by factional interests and focus groups. The Coalition does a faintly better job of sustaining our attention with its paternalistic melodrama. Hockey’s father-knows-best bullshit may not seem any more real or immediate than the ALP’s experimental drama, but at least it’s got a plot line you can follow.

Thanks to Willesee, Muir is now appears dangerously real. In his refusal to represent anything but the confusion and alienation of an era full of representation and no reality, he has a legitimate career.

Not since the birth of liberal democracy have two of its key establishments been both so reviled and powerless. Faith in the political process to deliver to the will of the people sits at a level roughly commensurate with love of traditional press. And not without reason. These powerful institutions have given us no reason to believe that they are acting in anything but self or mutual interest, and it is no wonder at all that many believe that social media’s foremost conspiracy idiots are reliable or politicians whose platform is “I hate politics” are trustworthy.