Under normal circumstances, not even the most ardent fan of professional wrestling will find the time to view Kentucky’s minor Appalachian Mountain league. But circumstances, as you know, are far from normal. In the West, we’ve been Trumped and we’ve been Brexit-ed. In ignorant desperation, media continue to make claims, shown recently in two major cases to be wildly overblown, that Russia is to blame. If we can’t trust press to make good sense of a present rejecting traditional politics, we may as well look to loud men in unitards.  Say hello to independent wrestling’s latest heel — ring jargon for “villain” — Progressive Liberal.

Wearing spandex printed with images of former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the heel, played by 36-year-old real estate agent Daniel Harnsberger, is the sport’s newest antagonist superstar. He yells at jeering crowds that they are “deplorables” and tells them that country music is a soundtrack for the dim-witted. He threatens to confiscate their guns, then makes like a DC technocrat. “I want to exchange your bullets for bullet points,” he shrieks. “Bullet points of knowledge!”

The wrestler has called his finishing signature move — which, of course, is destined never to secure a victory — “The Liberal Agenda”. All of this is, in my view, pretty funny. Right up until that inevitable point in the news cycle when I am reminded that Progressive Liberal’s parody is just a kick pad’s breadth away from our political reality.

Last Tuesday, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s decision to take a 2016 taxpayer-funded trip to the Great Australian Bight, accompanied by staffers and her young daughter, was questioned by conservatives. The journey to a pleasant tourist district was defended by the politician as one of fact-finding; she wanted to see firsthand how this leisure destination was threatened by “big oil”, an industry that has withdrawn from the region. The bill to assess an unlikely future threat was $3556.72.

[Larissa Waters and the Greens’ tedious return to identity politics]

Look. Maybe SHY was performing essential work. Perhaps without her brave efforts, the few well-to-do families destined to survive our Hunger Games future would not have been able to eat seafood in picturesque coastal villages, a comfortable base for whale watching. Possibly, those two scenic flights she took to survey the glorious ocean were carbon neutral and, if not, they will help safeguard vacations for generations of high-income earners to come.

In short, the politician may have had a good case to make for the journey. She did not, however, make it. With all the initial arrogance of a Bronwyn or a Sam, SHY came across all “how very dare you?” and made the claim that scrutiny of her travel expenses, a justifiably routine concern of press for all politicians, was based in — cop this — sexism. Probably racism, too!

The Greens’ dependable heel did not concede that a nation full of workers on stagnant incomes had the right to know if she’d been using their tax dollars thoughtfully. Instead, she claimed that she was the true victim here, subject to the cruel critique of “old white men”. Get your schnozz out of the slippery sweet oysters of Smoky Bay for a second, Sarah. We’ve seen the pictures of what looks very much like your spring break. And even some of us more everyday feminists might agree to bear a few insults from “old white men” if it meant we could afford a nice weekend at the beach.

It is likely that Hanson Young will not apologise. She, the sort of progressive high school prefect who attributes any playground moment of critique to broader social injustice, does not apologise. This, says The Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen, makes her exemplary of “the Left”.

Yeah. Nah. First, Sarah Hanson-Young is placed about as far to the left as the fish knives grasped at her subsidised seafood banquets. If Albrechtsen cannot detect the new emergence of a true left, then she hasn’t heard the names Corbyn, Melenchon or, ahem, Lee Rhiannon.  Such politicians do not, per Hanson Young and Larissa Waters and Progressive’s hero Hillary, figure themselves as victims. Their interest is in the victimisation of the many.

Even if we were to concede that SHY is credibly “left” outside The Australian, not just another uncritical fan of globalised economics who calls for a “compassionate” capitalism, her arrogant refusal to answer criticism is hardly partisan.

[Dear Angry White Men: HTFU, you’re not the victims]

They all do it. The policy and the media classes are always responding to criticism with the claim that they’re being “silenced”. And, honestly, press excels at it. On the “left”, we have dreary opportunists like Clementine Ford building careers on the publication of the mean tweets she has received. On the right, we have Bolt, Chris Kenny, even, at times, Albrechtsen herself who, although a little more restrained and a lot better read than most of her Murdoch fellows, is hardly above the tedious negation of, “I must be correct in my views because the ‘left’ says I am wrong”. And this, from the diaphanous centrist Caroline Overington, was one of the first pieces to publicly censure Yassmin Abdel-Magied — a person who can actually claim to be bullied into silence — for “silencing” “freedom of speech”. FFS. This is not “freedom of speech”. It’s a wrestling match.

Our policymakers and our journalists of whatever political hue have now acquired historic interest in themselves. Their pain, they reason, is everybody’s. If Bolt, after years of decrying the poor and the marginalised for their own plight, cops a serve, this is never a fathomable response to antagonism, but a case of his own oppression. If the “left” columnist Van Badham encounters argument from a true left curious to learn why she advocates for market-friendly politicians, she says this is evidence of misogyny.

And this pair are among our nation’s most widely read columnists. For them, as for many of our policymakers, the political is not merely personal anymore. The political is entirely narcissistic.

Such radical individualism, of course, is the alpha, and will be the omega, of our policy era. “It’s all about me and my struggles, which are everybody’s struggles” is not going to cut it for very much longer. Enjoy your oysters. Enjoy your wrestling match with a man dressed up as a parody of progressivism.

When Jeremy Corbyn was asked if he was hurt by the hostility of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the press, he answered that he was not in as much pain as the British people. That’s the way you do the politics of the future, people. You take it outside the ring and place it back where it belongs.