Fresh out of a Bachelor of Arts program and brimming with useless postmodern gobbledygook, I feel I’m uniquely qualified to give you plebs the key to understanding Donald Trump’s incomprehensible popularity. Ladies and gentlemen, please make yourselves uncomfortable.

Have you heard of internalised oppression? (Hold on, let me light up… All right.) The theory goes that years and years of stereotyping can lead members of a demographic to unconsciously mould their behaviour to suit that stereotype. It’s how radical feminists explain women who wear heels and refrain from eating their mate after sex.

Liberal Party supporters are accustomed enough to being called the party of angry, bigoted, rich, white, heterosexual males. You’re willing to sacrifice Mother Nature on the altar of free market capitalism. You’re slaves to big business, the church, patriarchy, morality, the Constitution, and all those niche interest groups that only serve your angry, bigoted, rich, white, male, heterosexual needs. And it’s about ten times worse for Republicans, mostly because… Well, a lot of the time it’s true. American Republicans have internalised this stereotype in a way Aussie Liberals can only dream of, Exhibit A being Donald Trump.

Of course, this wasn’t always the case. Some of us still look back fondly to the time when a Hollywood elite-turned-union thug went on to set the bar for conservative leadership across the Western world. But the GOP has gobbled up the Left’s caricature of itself. As with all internalised oppressions — racist, sexist, homophobic, conservaphobic, whatever — it’s born in no small part of exhaustion. Republicans are understandably tired of fighting the Ebenezer Scrooge-meets-Elmer Fudd stereotype they’ve been assigned by the liberal media.

And so, in the current election cycle, they’ve decided to quit fighting the tide and support the most belligerent, inarticulate, plutomaniacal candidate they could find. They’ve internalised the most unjust parody of American conservatism; and when its avatar appeared, like some neo-feudal Dalai Lama, in the person of Donald Trump, they went absolutely mad for him. It was self-loathing at first sight.

It really doesn’t matter what Trump believes, though eminent commentators like Jonah Goldberg and Charles Krauthammer have drawn our attention to the fact that he’s probably the most left-leaning of the major contenders. But if anyone was curious about the man beneath those fair golden tresses, the recent Republican candidates’ debate told us everything we need to know.

For one, he’s an arch crony capitalist. No surprise there: a report came out a few weeks ago saying that Bill Clinton called Trump in the lead-up to the race urging him to ‘play a bigger role’ in GOP politics. That’s the kind of thing any candidate would deny, right? Nope. Trump got right behind it. He even bragged about paying the Clintons to attend his wedding — indicative of nothing if not bad taste. ‘I give to everybody,’ he said. ‘When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me,’ quickly adding, ‘And that’s a broken system.’

No sh-t, Sherlock. But that someone could admit all that so blithely on national television and not be booed off the stage is symptomatic of some spiritual illness plaguing the GOP. It’s like The Donald decrying the outsourcing of American industry to China, and then confessing that his own menswear line is manufactured predominantly in China. Not that that’s good, he says: China’s currency manipulation makes it very difficult to employ domestic workers.

Of course, he’s right on both counts. The practice of American businessmen buying politicians’ favor and China’s currency manipulation are eminently harmful to the American people. But then he gets up on stage and says, ‘Look at me—I’m the reason you can’t get a job and loathe your government. I know this broken system inside and out. It’s made me more wealthy and powerful than you could ever dream of being.’ It’s like Fifty Shades of Fox News. He’s a self-centered, foul-mouthed, money-grubbing, president-bribing, job-killing robber baron. And Republicans love him for it.

‘Trumpmania’ is emblematic of American conservatives losing faith in their power of self-determination. They’re crying ‘Uncle’. They’ll wear that cute little sailor suit if the liberal media tells them to, no questions asked. Anything to fit in, even if the role they’re fitting into is humiliating and self-defeating.

However, Trump’s announced recently that he’s trying to come across as a bit nicer. No less straightforward or self-appraising, we’re sure — just softer. I’m going to make a prediction: he’s going to get a major boost from all his supporters saying, ‘See? He’s not such a bad guy! He can build bridges, kiss babies, enter a church without bursting into flames, etc.’

Then they’re going to realise they loved him because he was a bad guy, and all that’s left is a filthy rich, slightly racist middle-aged man with a bunch of glaringly un-conservative views. At that point, the difference between him and, oh, say, Jeb Bush will be that Jeb’s not racist. And so Trump’s campaign will flicker out, and he’ll be the most regrettable one-night stand the Republican Party’s had in a long, long time.

As for the Lucky Country, the Westminster system tends to ward off these sorts of populist dupes. The party room is less likely to shell out for snake oil than the general public. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you’re apt to get a few much-unneeded makeovers courtesy of your respective party’s ‘brand’ managers. It’s just a more white-collar way of bowing to media Lefties—more racketeering than snake oil peddling. Rather than (for instance) sticking by the Liberal Party’s conservative principles and taking any name-calling on the chin, there’s a risk of the party room dumping conservatism altogether and aping Labor Right. (‘This will certainly get the ABC off our backs, won’t it!’ the spin doctors will coo, rubbing Tony Jones’s thigh under the table.) If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, as they say — ‘they’ being everyone keen to see authentic conservatism extinguished forever, and by any means necessary.