This, I suspect, is the slow-motion disintegration of conservative politics that's bigger than Abbott, or Turnbull, or even Australia. Indeed we're seeing it most spectacularly in the United States, where, following his domination of Super Tuesday, Donald Trump is cruising towards the Republican presidential nomination.

That's why he's constantly choosing totemic issues to agitate: even ones for which he had no appetite as Prime Minister, like industrial relations. That's why his supporters are a crew of ideological warriors and not a reluctant collection of pragmatists as in Rudd's case. And that's why it threatens to do more long-term damage to the Coalition than even the Rudd-Gillard catastrophe did to Labor.

I don't doubt Abbott's story is also one of revenge. But there's more to it than that. Abbott's sniping is actually about something. He's trying to rehabilitate not merely his reputation, but his entire brand of politics.

This he has achieved despite the fact almost every Republican elder opposes him. They always have. During the last election season the Republican candidates cancelled a scheduled debate when the relevant news outlet announced Trump would be the moderator. Now, some Republican heads are spitballing ways they can use party rules to deny him the nomination even though his mandate from Republican voters is so strong.

This, too, is a party now out of control. But in truth it has been slowly spiralling out of control for years. Do you think Trump is heinous on immigration because he wants to build a wall to keep out Mexicans? So does the establishment's own Ted Cruz. Do you think Trump's declaration that climate change is a hoax makes him unworthy of office? Here's the other establishment candidate, Marco Rubio: "I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it." At least he seems to believe the science is in. He just chooses not to accept it.

It's true in a sense that Trump has stolen the Republican party. But it's also true it was there for the taking. There are many reasons Trump is succeeding – anger and disillusionment among a humiliated electorate is one of them. But there's also the fact that the Republicans have been training their voters to indulge every reactionary prejudice for years. Trump simply does this better, louder, and with less varnish than his rivals. Can we be surprised when he vanquishes them? Can the Republican establishment really cry foul when he outdoes them?

And is it so different here? Well, in a way, yes. A moderate is presently in the top job and the reactionary forces aren't yet taking endorsements from former Ku Klux Klan wizards (they'll have to settle for Reclaim Australia for now). But there's an important commonality too: that the contradictions that were once holding conservative parties together, and delivering them political success, have now fallen apart. The most important of these is the contradiction between liberal economics and the politics of "values".

It's hard to be the staunch defenders of family, culture and tradition while you're also staunch advocates of things like high-skilled immigration and workplace "flexibility" of the kind WorkChoices offered. It's hard to believe the market should be free to exploit and commodify whatever consumers will tolerate – sex, culture, children – and yet pretend we are bound together by inviolable, sacred values.