Last year I had a gentle crack at the newly fashionable ‘national conservative’ tendency on the Australian right, suggesting that much of it looked less like an organic Australian development and more like a copy-and-paste import from an American intellectual subculture. The NatCon critique of obscene progressive excess was sound – we’re all on board with that – but the intellectual architecture felt oddly foreign to our political soil. A top-down, elite-driven reordering to a more hierarchical and nationalist society for Australia did not resonate with me. Events overseas have only strengthened the point. Across the United States and Britain the populist right is splintering into ever smaller factions, each accusing the other of ideological impurity.

Overseas the pattern is becoming familiar. A movement emerges in revolt against elites; it gathers momentum; but soon enough a new faction declares that the insurgents themselves have been captured by the establishment. In Britain, Rupert Lowe’s Restore is coming for Nigel Farage’s Reform. The insurgent party has already produced new splinter movements accusing earlier rebels of betrayal. In the United States the ‘post-Liberal’ post-Trump right is fracturing with even more unhinged ferocity. Ideological movements built around purity – one of Jonathan Haidt’s conservative ‘values’ – are particularly susceptible to these dynamics almost by design.

Australia, however, is different. Our insurgent force – One Nation – bears little resemblance to the intellectual projects now fashionable in the US and the UK. For all its rough edges, One Nation is not an ideological movement at all. Its appeal rests not on a coherent doctrine but on something much simpler and more recognisably Australian: while the Bondi massacre has undoubtedly turbocharged One Nation’s present success, familiarity, consistency, authenticity and the sense that someone is prepared to say aloud what many voters already think. It is a long way from the NatCons in the US and even Reform in the UK.

That difference matters. One Nation’s support has grown not because it offers a refined philosophical program but because it feels, to many voters, culturally familiar and politically unfiltered. Authenticity, consistency over time and a willingness to say things as they are now count for a lot.

One reason the Australian story diverges from the American or British one is cultural. Barnaby Joyce has drawn a simple but important distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism is affection for country, community and the institutions that hold them together. Nationalism, by contrast, is an ideology – a doctrine that attempts to organise politics around a rigid conception of national identity.

Australians are instinctively patriotic but very few of us are ideological nationalists. We celebrate our country’s  incredible physical beauty, our sporting heroes, the Snowy Scheme, the Anzac tradition, our egalitarian culture. But it’s unlikely we would want to turn national belonging into a comprehensive political doctrine. Our political traditions are democratic, secular, pluralistic, pragmatic and suspicious of grand theories.

As I mentioned on this page recently, a useful lens for understanding this comes from the British writer David Goodhart, who describes the divide between Somewheres and Anywheres. The Somewheres – voters rooted in place, community and familiar institutions – are often culturally conservative but rarely ideological. Their politics is grounded in reality and truth rather than abstract theories. The Anywheres – highly educated and mobile – tend to be more comfortable with sweeping political narratives, relativism and abstract or overtly moral projects.

Although highly urbanised, large swathes of Australia remain firmly Somewhere country. Voters in regional communities, provincial areas and the outer suburbs no longer trust bureaucrats and are wary of rapid cultural change – but they are not generally searching for a grand ideological program to replace the existing order.

Much of the fracturing on the right here is not occurring in churches, town halls or local branch meetings but online. A small but noisy ecosystem spends its time consuming American podcasts, American political quarrels and American conspiracy language, then attempts to map those debates onto a country whose political culture is far more pragmatic. The loudest voices in these online battles often appear far more immersed in the ideological conflicts of Washington than in the day-to-day concerns of Australian voters.

Meanwhile something more interesting is happening in the electorate itself. Discontent with the major parties is producing insurgent movements on both edges of politics. Polls tell us that while One Nation smashes the Coalition and begins drawing support from disaffected Labor voters in regional Australia, the Australian Greens regain influence on the progressive flank. The result is a political landscape in which both major parties currently find themselves squeezed by anti-establishment sentiment from opposite directions.

Ditto the United Kingdom. In the recent Gorton and Denton by-election the Greens won a seat which had been held by Labour for generations, while Reform’s star candidate Matt Goodwin came second. The old parties – Labour and the Conservatives – were left languishing.

Australia’s political culture has historically resisted these dynamics. We are patriotic but rarely doctrinaire; sceptical of elites yet equally sceptical of grand ideological crusades. Our voters may flirt with insurgent movements when frustration with the political class runs high, but they tend to reward politicians who appear grounded in real communities rather than online ideological battles. The Gorton and Denton result is also a reminder that in the UK insurgent victories do not necessarily reflect a settled national mood or even the majority of a constituency:  turnout there was just 47.6 per cent, meaning fewer than half the electorate actually voted, so only a quarter or thereabouts voted for the Greens.

What happens in Australia will depend partly on the peculiar architecture of our electoral system. Compulsory preferential voting has a habit of forcing voters back toward the centre even as insurgent movements gather strength at the edges. It allows protest votes without necessarily handing power – or at least too much of it – to the edges.

Whether that feature ultimately protects Australia from the ideological fragmentation now on full display around the Anglosphere is an interesting question. Watch this space: it may yet prove to be the quiet genius of our system.