No, you didn’t misread the title. It reads, “Donald Trump is a liberal.”

Just to be clear, this isn’t an awkward attempt at dry humor.

It’s also not a belated cry that the President used to support gay marriage and abortion on demand, sometimes swears in public in a New York accent, and doesn’t know anything about the Bible, followed by a didactic lesson on real conservatism. All those things are factually true about Trump, of course. But I’m not claiming that Trump is a Democrat in poorly-tailored Republican’s clothing.

My point in choosing this title is that if Donald Trump had a coherent political philosophy that could be articulated and, hence, argued about by people other than himself, it would without doubt be the political philosophy of liberalism.

As I recently wrote in Arc, it’s possible that a future terrorist attack on American soil could prove to be an American Reichstag Fire moment, one in which our society takes a dramatic illiberal turn. Trump might then begin to exhibit illiberal, even authoritarian tendencies himself.

But that hasn’t happened yet, and it’s not certain to happen at all. Until such a moment occurs, we live in a liberal society under a liberal president. Don’t believe it? Just look at the Wikipedia definition of liberalism:

Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality. Whereas classical liberalism emphasizes the role of liberty, social liberalism stresses the importance of equality. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally they support ideas and programmes such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free markets, civil rights, democratic societies, secular governments, gender equality, and international cooperation.

Readers on both sides of the aisle may scoff, but so far, this definition fits President Trump to a T. The hallmarks of liberalism are liberty (i.e. freedom) and equality, and Trump has those in spades. I’ll explain in a moment why it matters that Trump is a liberal, but first I need to establish that he is one in the first place. Here goes.

Freedom, Trump said at the National Prayer Breakfast this year, “is a gift from God,” not a gift “from government.” His avowed interest in increasing military spending, at least in many Americans’ minds, fits with this little paean to freedom. And, importantly, it fits with the definition of liberalism above. George Washington said that military spending “was the most effectual means of preserving peace,” and it was President Wilson — the darling of liberals everywhere — who hoped to “make the world safe for democracy” by wading through the blood and gas of continental trench warfare.

Of course, Trump does not always sound like a hawk. Often enough, he speaks like an isolationist. But we should note that Trump’s protests that America has been “ripped off” and “raped” by our economic and military partnerships are also about preserving freedom by maintaining American power. For that reason, they also fit within liberal ideology.

So Trump is big on America’s national freedom to strut around the world stage. But what about individual freedoms? Surely we’ll find antiliberal tendencies lurking here. If we were to channel Trump himself, we might get a familiar answer: “Wrong!”

Many think Trump has excelled in protecting the liberal staples of free markets, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. Some on the right breathed a sigh of relief when Trump was elected because they had feared a supposedly illiberal left would restrict the core liberal values of freedom of religion and freedom of speech — for instance, force Catholic institutions to pay for abortifacients or limit speech critical of LGBT people on college campuses.

He has also protected free markets — just not in the ways the Democratic Party tends to interprets that doctrine. For instance, Trump has taken aim at the EPA and international restrictions on air pollutants, repeatedly claiming that such restrictions have unnecessarily hampered companies that employ many middle class and poor Americans. His picks for head of the EPA, Secretary of Labor, and Secretary of Health and Human Services are also advocates of deregulation, and Wall Street seems optimistic about business prospects under his administration. Further, Trump has claimed, despite backing out of the Transpacific Partnership and decrying the inequalities of NAFTA, that he will “have more free trade than Obama.” The moral of the story is that it’s not free trade and deregulation that bothers Trump. It’s America losing at anything.

As Trump said recently,

The American Dream is freedom, prosperity, peace-and liberty and justice for all. That’s a big dream. It’s not always easy to achieve, but that’s the ideal. More than any country in history we’ve made gains toward a democracy that is enviable throughout the world. Dreams require perseverance if they are to be realized, and fortunately we’re a hard-working country and people.

What does winning mean for Trump? Wealth, certainly, but also “liberty and justice for all.” That could mean a lot of things, but almost all of them fit snuggly within liberal theory. Even Trump’s nationalism, according to the theory of the great historian Benedict Anderson, fits easily into his liberal “philosophy” since liberal capitalist regimes were the ones in which nationalism first appeared.

Lastly, some people view Trump as the greatest proponent of Freedom of the Press in recent history. Sure, he has lied repeatedly about both very serious and very absurd matters, banned The Washington Post from his campaign events, and antagonized major news outlets at every turn. This week Trump banned The New York Times, CNN, and other major news outlets from a press briefing, and called the mainstream media “the enemy of the American people.” This is chilling language. As John McCain said on “Meet the Press”: “That’s how dictators get started.”

Yet Trump has not shut down major news outlets, and his rise to power coincided with the rise of alternative media, media less connected with elite institutions in the West and more with the perspective of the rural, non-educated reader.

According to FiveThirtyEight, Breitbart News more than doubled its share of general news readership from April to July of 2016, and Trump raised the profile of Wikileaks in unprecedented ways by continually discussing leaks pertaining to Hillary Clinton. In other words, Trump hasn’t really squelched the free press (so far), but he has given a voice to alternative media. One could argue that he has actually democratized the press!

Even if you concede many of the above points, you might still be waiting for me to mention the second calling card of liberalism: equality.

Surely Donald Trump cannot be said to be a liberal regarding equality! Trump has mocked reporters with disabilities, said (and done?) terrible things to women, been friendly with white nationalists, and spoken about placing judges on the Supreme Court bench who would undo marriage equality. Equality, many might want to say, is the furthest thing from Trump’s mind.

It all depends on how you look at it. Many on the right base their arguments against affirmative action, equal pay for equal work, and identity politics of every sort precisely on the liberal notion of equality. One prospective University of Texas student recently sued the school when she was not admitted, arguing that African-American students in Texas who were admitted to the university had worse grades and test scores, and yet they were accepted rather than her. Her claim was, in essence, that she was not being treated equally.

The same goes for arguments against gender, race, and sexual identity quotas. Those passed over for a minority candidate with lesser credentials get the short end of the stick in today’s society, and the elite who support such quotas, typically Democrats, only do so because it increases their own power. In fact, many white poor and middle-income people, particularly men and rural people, feel that it is they who are discriminated against. Money and power in today’s America flow continually to cities and minority populations and away from white, rural populations, and the inequity of the situation, such people claim, has simply gone too far. White identity politics is simply pointing out this undeniable fact. All that those in the Trump administration want is a level playing field, giving every American the same chance at the good life.

These arguments about equality, while being common coin on the right, leave those on the left exasperated. But, lefty readers, take note: the argument here is about the nature of the liberal value of equality. Neither Trump nor anyone else is speaking seriously about abandoning this value; they are only debating its meaning. If they were, we would be leaving political liberalism behind, but, as it is, the Trump administration has planted itself firmly in the liberal tradition.

Perhaps I’m in danger of losing readers who know a bit of history. “Liberalism in the sense you mean,” you might be saying, “is just the way nations are governed today. There’s the classical liberalism of Ted Cruz-like personas, and then there’s social liberalism of Bernie Sanders with a focus on minority populations. Both can be called liberalism.”

Right you are. Both Republicans and Democrats are liberals in this sense. But that doesn’t make the fact of Donald Trump’s liberalism trite or his occasional illiberal tone terribly important (yet). It means instead that in America today we are witnessing a battle between two liberalisms, or perhaps a battle for the soul of liberalism.

Social liberalism, which emphasizes equality, had largely won the day in the West because it was increasingly recognized that birth doesn’t place all of us at the same starting line. When the starting gun of life goes off, the child of privilege begins the race miles ahead of the child of poverty. Identity politics is just one more instantiation of social liberalism, a type that focuses making individuals in marginalized groups equal. Classical liberalism, which emphasizes freedom, is still a type of liberalism, and it still believes itself to promote equality. It’s what we mean by freedom and equality that’s at stake in this battle.

But I would like to argue that the casus belli in this war of liberalisms is not the difference between social liberalism and classical liberalism; it’s their similarities. This brings us to the last defining feature of liberalism, a feature which in some ways trumps (pun intended) all the others: individualism.

Liberalism and individualism go together hand and glove.

That’s true whether you’re a classical liberal or a social liberal. For the classical liberal, it’s every individual who is equal before the law, and the government should do nothing to change that balanced approach. For social liberalism, culture and nature create some of the inequalities in our society. It’s government’s job to make sure every individual has a fair shake, irrespective of their gender, race, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation. For liberalisms of every kind, every individual stands alone before the (large or small) Leviathan of government, and no one else, whether parent, lover, or god, can mediate that relationship.

For this reason, liberalisms of every stripe lack basic things that most societies in history have possessed. What are some of these? For starters, liberal societies lack any notion of the common good, the idea that there is some social good out there that we’re aiming at together. Thus individuals and groups of individuals are left to wrest both longed-denied justice and lusted-for goods from other people by allying with those who are (momentarily) like-minded. We’ve lost any clear notion of the role of the family, formerly the most basic structure in society. Often, families barely see one another in our culture, and, even more importantly, families lack any shared goals, so there’s no reason for them to stay together beyond the point of mutual amenability.

In fact, this has become true of every sort of association. We move away from the communities of our childhood to pursue our dreams or a career or a woman we met on Match.com, and, as we do it over and over again, the thread of our lives becomes knotted and frayed, our story lacking any coherent theme. As sociologist Robert Putnam has found, Americans simply do not know other people deeply anymore, and polls show that Americans’ trust for one another has nearly been cut in half since 1972. For this reason, we lack any clear understanding of why unrestrained greed is a bad thing, since today we lack the life-giving relationships greed threatens to rip apart. Thus a higher GDP and greater individual freedom become the basic measures of a healthy society.

With the loss of tradition, we have also lost the communities formed by it. Tradition is simply the stories we tell about how we became the way we are, stories that are passed down in our communities and have stood up to sustained attack time and again. For that reason, tradition becomes the bedrock upon which societies build their houses, their rationale for continuing to exist. It’s what keeps us steady in the midst of the storm. Today, if the wind rises and the waves beat upon our American house, one has to wonder if there’s any foundation left to keep it in place.

Stanley Hauerwas has expressed all of this by crafting another definition of liberalism. For Hauerwas:

liberal polity is the attempt to show that societal cooperation is possible under the condition of distrust. The very genius of our society is to forge a political and social existence that does not have to depend on trusting others in matters important for our survival.

With all our technocratic know-how, America is dangerously close to failing to realize this dearly-held but foolhardy hope.

This is why I’m so concerned about a major terrorist attack on American soil and worry that it might lead to an American Reichstag Fire moment. It’s not because President Trump will necessarily become an authoritarian leader in the wake of such an attack — though that could happen too. It’s because liberalism, which both the Republican and Democratic parties endorse, has slowly eroded the foundation of our society until communal stories, bonds, and shared goals have been washed away, leaving our society fragmented and uncertain of itself. And all this has happened without any serious outside threat.

I fear a Reichstag Fire moment because Americans can no longer imagine a future together, let alone with people different from us, because we haven’t had community with one another in a very long time. We have no shared narratives, no overarching stories that we can enjoy, argue about, and enact together, so how could we have any future? The Trump movement has merely trotted this sad situation out onto the stage of history and forced it to dance about awkwardly in front of the footlights. They haven’t actually sought solutions for it.

As a public figure, Trump himself, with his cries of “make America rich again” and rantings about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings on “The Apprentice,” stands absolutely no chance of restoring the old foundations or of helping Americans form new ones. He seems constitutionally incapable of metaphysical commitment; he might even be constitutionally incapable of thinking about the good of other people. He is, in other words, a typical product of American society. He is, like nearly all of us, a liberal.

And that is what makes him dangerous.