How many votes do you reckon Kevin Rudd lost when it emerged he had visited the Scores strip club in 2003 during a drunken Manhattan bar crawl? Or what about Donald J Trump? How much support do you imagine he lost when the notorious bus tape surfaced showing him bragging about his exploits with married women and confessing to sexually assaulting them?
The answer is probably none. At least not in net terms anyway.
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This is obviously more disturbing in the case of Trump than Rudd, given their relative seriousness.
If anything, Rudd's support climbed on the strength of a night out in which he reportedly behaved inappropriately in the club, or as many would say, acted like a surprisingly normal bloke on the turps. Conveniently, he could not remember.
![The ripples of Donald Trump's victory are challenging long-established norms of western politics.](/web/20161127110058im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/w/a/5/u/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsve1z.png/1480198400098.jpg)
Three months after the controversy, he was elected in a landslide so decisive it tipped John Howard from the Parliament.
Ditto for the openly misogynist Trump who, despite his total inexperience, and grievous daily lies on the campaign trail, was still preferred over a vastly more qualified alternative, several weeks later.
He may have fared more poorly had his sexual predations come out just days before the election, as the FBI ensured occurred with Hillary Clinton in its on-again-off-again email investigation.
But then, maybe not.
Saturation campaign coverage and associated media condemnation of Trump's behaviour counted for nought in the end – water off a duck's back to his newly acquired "Budweiser Democrats".
The benign theory behind both incidents is that once the voters have decided to switch to you, they tend not to change again before the election, even if potentially serious character questions arise late in the game.
The less benign theory relates specifically to gender. It posits that sexism, including unconscious gender bias, is so ingrained in the community psyche, that when exposed as it was in these two cases, it was far less shocking to ordinary people than to the headline writers, politicians, and other moral intermediaries in the so-called "chattering classes".
The net result is that it wasn't a game-changer suggesting the python-squeeze strictures of political correctness are not as pervasive as claimed. Indeed, plain speaking, including rank ignorance and outright abuse, seem to be thriving.
So much so that even flagrant disrespect for women, up to and including actual molestation, can be laughed off, deemed not central enough to a person's moral character as to render them unsuitable for office.
In one undignified angry lunge, Americans had jumped from Barack Obama's "audacity of hope" to Donald Trump's audacity of grope.
Perhaps a popular political juggernaut built on the word "HOPE" was always destined to fall short, but the scale of this, given Obama's achievements, and his own impeccable character, is hard to fathom.
Hard that is, unless you have been angry for a long time.
The new I-told-you-so orthodoxy casts Trump's triumph as the inevitable pendulum-swing from oppression - the result of ordinary people striking back against what newly emboldened conservatives call the "neo-fascism of political correctness". According to this, western liberalism has been hijacked by virtue signallers who tell people what to think through an all-encompassing left-aligned cultural hegemony.
Society is seen as hopelessly divided with the under-represented majority on the outside of the game and the over-resourced minority on the inside, enjoying the spoils.
The backlash means conservatives must remake themselves as the new radicals. Their project is nothing less than an overturning of the moral, social, and economic consensus of the post-Cold War balance from the United Nations, the European Union, and free trade and climate change agreements, to laws upholding multiculturalism and prohibiting racism and sexism.
This is the bow-wave from Trump's extraordinary victory and it continues to rock the long-established norms in western politics, globally.
When Victorian Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie crossed the floor to vote against a continued ban on the Adler shotgun, she expressed a world-weary fatigue about the dictates of "political elites who think they know better".
Pauline Hanson last week had taken about as much as she could also. "I am fed up with people ... calling me a racist when they cannot find one thing that I have said that is racist." This from someone who used her maiden speech in 1996 to warn of the danger of being swamped by Asians, and rejigged that 20 years later as a returning senator, this time targeting Muslims.
Sentiments of such cumulative discontent are assuming a normative purpose in a new right-wing discourse. Language is being reclaimed and a whole new project of virtue signalling on behalf of the lumpen-proletariat is afoot.
One wonders what the new resenters made of Malcolm Turnbull's speech at the dispatch box last week wearing a white ribbon.
Restating his line that not all disrespect for women ends in domestic violence, but all domestic violence against women begins with disrespect, he questioned whether such language was tough enough.
This is violence he said and therefore a crime, so perhaps the words should reflect that seriousness more strongly than the term domestic violence.
One for the locker room with Trump, perhaps?
Mark Kenny is chief political correspondent.
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