Donald Trump and Peter Dutton have both embraced populism. Are working-class voters buying it?

Trump’s dream of restoring American manufacturing dominance would involve a resurgence of long-term employment in large and medium-sized firms. He is promising the stability once associated with unions, not the “flexibility” that Australia’s Liberals want in workplaces.

For the most part, Liberals still prefer to talk about blue-collar workers as independent tradespeople or aspiring business owners rather than employees.

Dutton says the modern Liberal Party is the friend of “small business owners and employees in that business”. This conjures images of family-like operations where staff loyally put in unpaid overtime – instead of larger, impersonal workplaces (where unpaid overtime is also the norm).

And unlike Trump Republicans, the Liberal and National parties still believe in free trade. After a long bipartisan opposition to protectionism, Labor has recently embraced a major new industrial policy. The Coalition is not on board.

Some doubt whether Trump is a genuine populist. But he has a wider scope for genuinely populist rhetoric than Dutton, at least for now.

Even though he’s a symbol of capitalist excess, part of Trump’s message is that capitalism has taken a wrong turn. Not just into excessive wokeness, but into globalisation and financialisation, where investment and speculation are more profitable than production.

There are limits to how much any Liberal leader, even Dutton, can tap into anger with capitalism itself.