"We are the trustees of two great political traditions," John Howard said as Prime Minister, referring to both his party's classical liberal and conservative strands of thought. "And if you look at the history of the Liberal Party, it is at its best when it balances and blends those two traditions." That can work for a time, but eventually it cannot hold. These are not simply counterbalancing flavours to be blended in some magical ratio. Illustration: Andrew Dyson We're dealing with a fundamental contradiction here between a liberal tradition that values freedom over consensus, cultural experimentation over tradition, and individualism over group solidarity; and a conservative one that is much the reverse. Even a master like Howard couldn't hold it together in the end, his premiership crashing on the radically liberal shores of WorkChoices that simply did away with conservative family-values ideas like, say, predictable working hours. It's also not like Turnbull didn't try. He gave in to his culture warriors on the Safe Schools program. He so clearly forwent his own judgment on climate change and same-sex marriage, committing himself to a plebiscite with little to commend it and that he clearly doesn't believe in. The trouble is that in the decade since Howard, this political fault line has become a chasm. That's why the most reactionary elements of the right are not merely culturally nationalist; they are economically protectionist as well. Here we find Pauline Hanson just as surely as we find Donald Trump and a certain strand of Brexiteer. And truth be told, members of this wing of the Liberal Party have more in common with Hanson than their partisan commitments will allow them to admit. They pursue a version of what we might once have called left-wing economics – hence George Christensen's self-declared war on globalisation. They aren't a million miles away from the pre-Whitlam Labor party that, partly for protectionist reasons, were such devoted fans of the White Australia policy. And arguably, they're appealing to very much that kind of constituency. White, working class, predominantly male.

I suppose, then, it's true to say the next phase is an enormous test of Turnbull's leadership skills. But that's not particularly illuminating because it might just be that no one has the leadership skills to circle this particular square. These contradictory forces aren't being reconciled anywhere at the moment. The Tories who were once the most staunch champions of a Britain inside Europe have lost control of their party's heart. The Republicans have completely lost their party to Trump's anti-free trade tirades. Illustration: Simon Letch Turnbull hasn't yet lost his party, but perhaps that's because he never really had it. The Coalition struggled in this election because it never really offered a clear agenda. Its centrepiece was an expensive business tax cut of tiny economic benefit and even less political appeal. But really, what other option was open to him? The ideological rift in the Coalition means your choices are either paralysis of the kind we saw this year, or some crazy-brave agenda of the kind Abbott delivered in the 2014 budget that made his government unelectable quicker than just about any other government in our history. Malcolm Turnbull: an enormous test of his leadership skills awaits. Credit:Christopher Pearce

The major parties are now in structural decline – as Turnbull himself acknowledged this week – because they now are now symbols for a politics that no longer exists. Left and right have almost never been meaningful terms, but today whatever residual meaning they might have had has fragmented into nothing coherent. If we were starting our political parties today, from scratch, we simply wouldn't have Labor and the Coalition. We'd have a reactionary neo-nationalist party straddling One Nation and the outer reaches of the Coalition. There would be a Greens-like party, suspicious of the free market, and built on concepts like equality and sustainability. And there would be a more centrist one, spanning parts of Labor and the Coalition: generally liberal, inclined towards free trade, and mostly culturally open. In the decade since John Howard, the political fault line has become a chasm. Credit:Andrew Sheargold This would be the natural party of government, but it would struggle to form a reliable majority. Most likely it would end up in a series of power-sharing arrangements with the party either side of it. It would be volatile, occasionally rancorous, but perhaps over time might find an uneasy equilibrium as we matured and got used to the fact that majorities don't really exist anymore. And really, that's what we have now, only without the labels that make the divisions in our politics intelligible. We proceed under the fiction that ideological divisions are failures of leadership. And so, we're left only with this spectacle of perpetual, exhausting crisis Waleed Aly is a Fairfax columnist, the winner of the 2015 Quill award for best columnist, and a lecturer in politics at Monash University.