In this sense, as in others, America is becoming more like Europe, where conservatism has been less than religious for some time, and the cultural right has long had a fractured and incoherent quality. (Consider France’s National Front, which draws support from Catholic traditionalists, ex-Communist workingmen and secular — and gay — voters who fear Islam’s encroachments.)

So perhaps it’s appropriate that Milo, a European import, has been one of the first to successfully straddle the fractures. If each faction on America’s new cultural right is a stranger to the others, he is a stranger to all of them. The social conservatives are strait-laced, and he’s promiscuous (he says); the male anti-feminists are insistently straight, and he’s flamboyantly gay; the working-class white heartlanders are, well, working-class heartlanders, and he’s a British-accented foreigner.

But his outsider status is a selling point, not a liability. Even as it lets him turn the left’s identity politics against itself, it also enables him to flatter each conservative constituency in a somewhat different way, to give each a piece of vindication and play to each with a piece of his persona.

Thus he lets religious conservatives feel, on the one hand, like they’re accepting the realities of the culture war — it’s over, we lost, we need to make allies of gay people instead of scapegoats — while simultaneously suggesting, through his performative promiscuity, his Victorian-decadent relationship with Catholicism, that they were actually right about homosexuality all along. (As the writer Walter Olson of the Cato Institute pointed out recently, a staider sort of gay conservative might actually have less appeal.)

He lets male chauvinists and alt-right tough guys feel vindicated in their hostility to political correctness — see, even the gay guy in drag gets it — while offering a harsh critique of feminism that unlike theirs is free from the accusation that it’s being offered in sexual self-interest.

And when he goes out to Middle America — I recommend watching his visit to Memories Pizza in Indiana, the small-town pizzeria subjected to a two-minute hate because its owners said they might not cater a gay wedding — he presents himself (posh-sounding accent and all) as an ambassador from the cosmopolitan reaches of society, here to apologize for the terrible behavior of his fellow snobs and globe-trotters.

So Milo’s appeal on the right is, one might say, intersectional.

Moreover, his provocations tend to actually work, in the sense that they summon up the illiberal, “shut up or we’ll shut you down” side of left-wing politics. Time and again, the offensive thing he said or did to prompt protests or violence or hysteria recedes into the background, and all that conservatives take from his performances is the vindication of their fears about the left. Indeed this is precisely why he found himself offered a prominent slot at CPAC — for the sake of the illiberal responses his campus appearances elicit, for his enemies’ sake rather than his own.