The real puzzle in next Tuesday's presidential election is why George W Bush is not going to get hammered. Tens of millions of ordinary Americans live in more economic insecurity and enjoy less opportunity as a result of the America he is building. Abroad he is leading his country into a dangerous and unwinnable confrontation with Islamic fundamentalism that obstructs the rooting out of terrorism, whose crassness is exposed daily in the flow of news from Iraq. A grass roots revolt should throw him out of office as an incompetent.And yet most polls give him the lead over challenger John Kerry by a narrow margin. The incumbency effect is part of the explanation, as is the skill with which Bush has played the security card. But the deeper truth is that conservative America has become a formidable cultural and electoral force - and it offers its allegiance to George Bush instinctively and unhesitatingly.Even if Kerry manages to win, American conservatism will remain the most dynamic component in American political life. Although a Kerry victory (for which I hope) is conceivable, it is already clear that the race is so tight that the Republicans will retain their grip on the House of Representatives - with little prospect of an early reversal. Talk to Republicans and they regard their control of the House together with more state legislatures as the heart of their power base; in the checked and balanced US political system the presidency is the necessary but insufficient condition for political leadership.In short, a Kerry victory would only be the end of the beginning; for the Democrats to move the US even marginally from its current hardening right-wing trajectory, the long-term task is the rebuilding and sustaining of the liberal coalition that they held from Roosevelt's New Deal to the end of the 1960s - and which will allow them to challenge what is now a Republican legislative dominance. That requires not just political energy and a mobilisation on the ground that the Democrats have only just begun to demonstrate - it also means winning the battle of ideas, where they are still at first base.The scale of  the challenge - and the political and intellectual embeddedness of US conservatism - is still not properly grasped. And why, despite his monumental mistakes and gawky malapropisms, Bush is still the narrow favourite to win?I got a clearer idea why in a debate at the Oxford Union on Thursday night; speaking for Bush's re-election was Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and one of the leaders of the American Conservative revolution. Norquist's rhetoric made little impact on his quintessentially British liberal audience - our pro-Kerry side was to win four to one - but you could see how effective his pitch would be in the US. The Democrats were a coalition of the liberal elite and the two wings of the 'Dependency Movement', he declaimed - those who receive welfare and those who administer it. When somebody got a job and became a Republican (working and being a Republican were coterminous) they quickly saw the case for paying less or no tax. The Republican base was at bottom about industrious, self-starting business people and workers who didn't want government to tell them what to do or spend so much of their money. Bush would continue to deliver to this constituency. Vote for him.  We've heard pitches for lower taxes before, but an Oliver Letwin or even John Redwood doesn't do it with the same sting or passion. What gives Norquist its bitter, cutting edge is the depth of his complaint. He's on the side of the ordinary American and the common man against the liberal elite and the do-gooders. They're the wine drinkers, the French speakers, the interferers in American lives, the indulgers of homosexuals, the mockers of faith and the upholders of political correctness.Norquist is on the side of working Americans living in the outer suburbs springing up like topsy around every US city; the network of soulless shopping malls, never-ending cloned streets and newly built churches created by the appetite of US property developers. These instant developments are communities only in name; their rootless inhabitants, questing for meaning in their lives, are the prey upon which the New Republicanism feeds.Its success, as Thomas Frank writes in his compelling book  What's the Matter with America? , is that it has used largely cultural symbols - against irreligion, abortion, gun control, stem-cell research - to build a new working-class constituency that believes an allegedly hegemonic liberal elite wants to do down what working America holds dear.They will build national parks on farmland, mandate special holidays for transgendered war veterans, decree only gay couples can adopt children, as part of the same world view that wants to control gun use and get UN resolutions to act in Iraq. Thus the working class becomes the ally of a party that gives tax cuts to the top 1 per cent and is set on undermining the institutions that try to offer working Americans security and opportunity. The irony could not be more complete.Frank sees no end in sight, largely because the secular forces unleashed by American capitalism are so powerful. This is the genius of the conservative position. It is a crusade fuelled by a never-ending tide of complaint that is compelled to set itself unachievable objectives in its battle to reduce women's rights and against the commercial ethic that so beleaguers religion but their non-achievement only proves the malevolent hegemony of the liberal elite and thus the correctness of the right's analysis.THIS HOSTILITY to modernity and sense of beleaguerment spills over to fuel an ugly American nationalism. Foreigners, and especially Muslim foreigners, are part of the threat to the values and lifestyles of ordinary God-fearing Americans. To cast the response to 11September as a war on terror not only offers a route to achieving American security; it enlists, as Bush knows full well, this new American nationalism to the cause and thus the side of militant Republicanism. To understand his campaign - speeches laced with biblical references, solidarity over every right-wing cultural icon, commitment to cut taxes and insistence he is the right commander-in-chief to lead the US in its war on terror - you need to understand the new forces underpinning American conservatism.Kerry and the Democrats confront a Hydra. They have assets - America's knowledge workers, Hispanics and blacks are all massively Democrat; a significant part of America's working class do understand which party represents their interests and are dubious about rabid conservatism.The good news is that this liberal coalition is giving Bush's Republican party such an effective challenge; the bad news is that it is not more effective still. Win or lose on Tuesday, progressive America still has a lot to do - but it would be better to start by winning.