David ‘Bacon Whoopie’ Cameron is now the most conservative head of government in the English-speaking world. Let that sink in for a moment. Cameron’s conservative credentials are so piss-poor that he was cast alongside Malcolm Turnbull, John Key, and Justin Trudeau as one of the Four Horsemen of Liberalism in Paul Kelly’s op-ed in the Oz ‘The Dilemma of Conservatism’. And the only thing that makes Cameron more conservative than Key is that he hasn’t joined the leaf-themed flag movement that’s been sweeping the Anglosphere. (Maybe a green banner with a crisp, golden oak leaf, Dave?) Anyway, it’s a charge that we should take seriously. We have to wonder if old Fukuyama isn’t right in one respect: is the status quo now liberal? And, if so, is liberalism the new conservatism?

There’s one indicator that’s yet to be taken into consideration, and that’s the Republican primaries. America’s ideological hegemony can’t be overestimated. Besides the obvious influence of George W. Bush’s neoconservatism on the Howard government, American attitudes are contagious to British governments of otherwise-antithetical parties: Bush also exercised tremendous sway over Blair’s Labour government, and prominent Tories like Daniel Hannan raised eyebrows on both sides of the Pond by endorsing Obama in 2008. So anyone making a judgement about the future of conservatism in the Anglosphere—Australia included—without taking into account trends in American conservatism isn’t getting close to the whole picture.

Look, I’ve rubbished Trump in these pages before, and I’ll do so again. He’s a phony. He doesn’t have a conservative bone in his body. And that Republicans are mistaking his ignorance and vulgarity for conviction and leadership is deeply concerning. Yet it’s also rather curious that the Republican Party base, which almost suicide-bombed Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign for flip-flopping on abortion, doesn’t give a wink that Trump used to think of himself as sitting to the left of the Democratic Party. Part of that, no doubt, can be chalked up to the cult of personality. But it runs deeper.

Trump’s running on an anti-globalist platform, plain and simple. Three issues set him apart substantively from his opponents: a scepticism toward military intervention, economic protectionism, and opposition to mass immigration. His detractors have labelled him a xenophobe, and I think that’s a persona he actively cultivates by just skirting on the edges of racism, especially toward Latinos. But, looking at Ukip’s Nigel Farage and (yes) ‘Straya’s own Bob Katter, it’s clear that this sort of ultra-patriotism isn’t by any means naturally grounded in racism. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe Trump’s supporters are by and large racist. I think most of them are honest, hardworking, blue-collar types who face the real consequences of reckless globalisation. They’ve lost their jobs to undocumented migrants, their companies have been outsourced to the Third World, and they’ve seen their neighborhoods devastated by ethnic violence. There are similar stories in Australia—and, heck, it’s even worse in Europe. Sure, these neo-nationalists mightn’t be responding in any strikingly coherent or productive manner, but it’s no use pretending they’re simply ignorant bigots without any legitimate grievances. Nor, by the by, should we think this trend will go the way of Trump if he’s beaten. Maybe it took an ‘outsider’ to raise these issues on the national stage, but now that the conversation has begun there’s no muffling it.

So the rise of Trumpism isn’t, to my mind, emblematic of the further weakening of Anglosphere conservatism. It’s a reconsideration of conservatives’ priorities. As social conservatism appears to wane, an equally conservative sense of liberalism’s dependence on Western cultural norms is emerging as a new consensus. Conservatives have long said that the virtues of liberalism (social toleration, free trade, etc.) are inseparable from the ancient history and living institutions of the societies that fostered them. They can’t simply be rendered as an ideology and consciously embraced by a population. This conclusion is increasingly impossible to ignore, as we saw with the PM’s strikingly Abbott-esque ultimatum to radical Islamists: ‘It is not compulsory to live in Australia. If you find Australian values are, you know, unpalatable, then there’s a big wide world out there and people have got freedom of movement.’ That’s not just a rare display of liberal testicular fortitude: it’s the activation of liberalism’s survival instinct.

We may see this, too, as the advent of a sort of ‘muscular liberalism’. For far too long, liberals have been waffling between their core principles and the malaise of moral relativism contracted in the back of a van sometime in the ‘60s. It’s ever clearer that unconditional tolerance of Islam is a threat to the rights of women and sexual minorities, among others. As Australia’s (and Britain’s, and America’s) manufacturing base evaporates and her consumers become increasingly dependent on goods manufactured in the Third World, liberals may also be forced to oppose further transnational monopolies in favor of small business and local markets, which are the heart of the free, competitive economy that liberalism extolls.

The American liberal comedian Bill Maher exemplified this new muscular liberalism in a controversial statement last year that marked a striking departure from the self-defeating relativism that has come to define Western liberalism. Lashing out against his ideological fellows’ complacency with radical Islam, Maher said, ‘We’re liberals!… we need to identify illiberalism wherever we find it in the world, and not forgive it because it comes from [a group] people perceive as a minority.’ That’s exactly it. Liberals are finally realizing that, contra Fukuyama, liberalism isn’t the inevitable endpoint of history—that they need to fight for it. Marxists had this same revelation in the ‘80s when, happily, their project had been fatally wounded.

As for conservatives, I hope we’re prepared to encourage small-‘L’ liberals as they begin this awkward transition from childish idealism to a manly, principled pragmatism. Anyway, there’s not a snowball’s chance in Mecca that the values and institutions we cherish will take root where liberalism can’t survive. Once the existential threats to Western civilization are stamped out, we can duke it out amongst ourselves.