Is the current President of the United States just making up policy according to his own idiosyncratic whims and fancies? This seems to be the common view of among Australia’s most esteemed political commentators.
“Trump doesn’t govern by any consistent philosophy or ideology” says foreign editor of The Australian, Greg Sheridan. “Trump has a dominant political personality, rather than an ideology” agrees Paul Kelly, the same newspaper’s editor-at-large. Phil Coorey, political editor of The Australian Financial Review has said similar: “Trump doesn’t govern from a political philosophy—he improvises from the gut”.
With respect, this is simply not right. Just as Reaganism was not solely created by The Gipper, there is clearly a coherent political ideology behind “Trumpism”.
The movement guiding policy in the White House has been variously described as “national conservatism” or “post-liberalism”. While there are various strands to this “new right” and some disagreement on elements, what unites them all is a criticism of the political liberalism which has dominated Western democracies, Australia amongst them, in recent times.
This is not just a Trump or even American phenomenon. JD Vance openly describes himself as “post liberal”. The largest centre-right think tank in Washington DC, the Heritage Foundation, talks about being now “national conservative”. Vance’s friend, James Orr is head of the national conservatives in Europe and is now Nigel Farage’s senior advisor in Reform UK. Plenty of leaders in Europe like Giorgia Meloni or Viktor Orbán are on board with this new approach and have spoken at NatCon conferences.
The attack on liberalism has induced much pearl-clutching, but it should not actually be considered particularly radical. It is, in fact, what traditional conservative leaders have always more or less believed. “The tone and tendency of liberalism,” Benjamin Disraeli, the great Prime Minister of the British Conservative Party argued, “is to attack the institutions of the country in the name of reform and to make war on the manner and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.” He would fit in easily with so-called “post-liberal” right today.
All of this has caused much confusion in Australia. Howard-era legacy types like to use the name “conservative”, but when they do, they are almost invariably describing the ideology of Dizzy’s great rival, William Gladstone. The “Grand Old Man” of the British Liberal Party believed in things like free trade, a moral crusading foreign policy, and a conviction that nations are held together by “liberal values”.
Many self-identifying “conservatives” in Australia not only get their terminology very muddled, but they also misunderstand the very party of which many are a part.
Robert Menzies undoubtedly admired Gladstone (as do I in many ways), but when you look at the policies he supported, they were often the direct opposite of what 19th century “classical liberals” believed. On trade, immigration, worker protection, foreign policy, and more he generally favoured a much more nationalist/conservative/Disraelian approach.
It is true the party Menzies founded – unique among modern centre-right parties in the Anglosphere — uses the word “liberal” in its name. But he really looked to the “enlightened nationalism” of Federation leaders such as Alfred Deakin as his model rather than the old British Liberal Party.
However, the generation who took over after Menzies started to govern in very different “liberal” way. Around the world, a similar transformation occurred to many parties of the political right at the same time. The change in this outlook and the consequences which followed were profound.
Traditional conservatives recognized that nations grew out of and were made for a particular people: that Hungary, for example, was created by, for and of Hungarians. The main goal of public policy, in their view, was to ensure the traditions, language, beliefs, and their people continued in future generations and that their conditions were improved.
Political liberals, by contrast, tended to see nations as primarily as ideological constructs. Thus, anyone from Tehran to Timbuktu could become part of these new liberal nations — not through a slow, carefully managed, and gradual process, but by simply residing in the geography for a couple of years and taking a pledge or passing a vague “values” test.
An unprecedented ethnic transformation of nations across the West resulted.
This flawed thinking is the root cause of western Europe’s “civilization erasure”, which the Trump administration referred to in its recently issued national security strategy.
Similarly, conservatives historically recognized that, when it comes to international commerce, the world we live in is a harsh and uncertain place, one in which nations compete against one another and that trade policy needed to reflect this.
Liberals instead embraced a utopian belief that any tariffs or similar restrictions were illegitimate, and a country should aim to have open-borders trade with every nation on earth. This ideology has caused Australia and much of the West to become largely deindustrialised and our manufacturing base outsourced to Third World and often hostile regimes.
Conservatives recognized that foreign policy should not be, in the words of Disraeli, “conducted on the principles of a sermon”, that one must be extremely prudent about the wars your country is engaged in.
Liberals, since the days of Gladstone and continuing to the “forever wars” of George W Bush, have always tended to want to fight for abstract ideas in far of places regardless of whether the vital interest of their own nation were really at stake. Often very emotive and idealistic rhetoric was used to justify these interventions. But they more often then not end up in a loss of blood, treasure, and prestige while spawning negative unintended consequences.
Liberalism is not the same thing as freedom. Many conservatives are strong defenders of the latter. Liberalism, by contrast, is a belief system which tends to destroy institutions, traditions, religions, the family unit, nations, and even ultimately definitions of words like “man” and “women”, because it views individual liberty as the sole metric against which public policy should be judged.
I accept Trump’s style is obviously not to everyone’s taste. He can be erratic at times and he’s no angel. He doesn’t quote Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott at his rallies, but the movement he represents is identifiably conservative. The Australian centre-right which currently is in the doldrums would do well to push past the individual himself and focus on the ideas behind him as that way lies renewal and future electoral success.
First published in Quadrant Online 11th December 2026 as “With Trump It’s Not Just Whims and Fancies” © Dan Ryan 2026. All Rights Reserved.
