Just over six months ago, Labor lost the unloseable election to a supposedly unelectable incompetent band of buffoons. Time stood still during that miserable evening, the extinguished hope of generations pungent in the air. Broken spirits and broken hearts lay strewn across a nation renewed blue.

One can bloviate about the unfairness of it all; the underhanded tactics, the biased media, corporate money laundering masquerading as a political campaign. But, as with everything, these are less the causes of political dysfunction, but rather symptoms of both the true nature of the liberal capitalist model under which we live, and the complete failure of the socialist left to engage earnestly, mobilise politically, and to build class consciousness. A false consciousness has developed at the heart of the contemporary Australian experience.

Kickstared by Hawke and Keating, and supercharged by Howard and Costello, neoliberalism has manifested as the centering of individual gain at the expense of the collective good, and the organisation of state power in order to privilege those already privileged. Alongside this, with its middle class welfare of tax refunds for stock and property portfolios and a deliberate policy of inflating asset bubbles, has been asserting corporate primacy over society. Privatisation, corporate subsidies, deregulation.

Private health insurance rebates. Excessive funding of private schooling while letting the public system crumble. The threat of deregulating tertiary education fees. Destroying the organs of worker power while allowing privatised wage theft to run rampant. There’s no shortage of examples.

More than this, however, is the cultural shift in the public consciousness that has occurred through the political-media filter. We are conditioned to identify with the aspirational middle class. The modern battler with a mortgage on an expensive McMansion, a six figure salary, and building a million dollar SMSF. On the flipside, The utter condemnation of asylum seekers, the Indigenous, immigrants, the unemployed and destitute serve both as an excluded threat to social cohesion, and as a reminder to remain servile lest your comfortable aspiration be stolen from you.

Not to claim that these currents are new in Australian society, indeed they have existed since the days of invasion, and were fundamental to the formation of the concept of Australian nationality. But they are the ascendant principles of an Australia that has forgotten about the Fair Go.

A specific manifestation of this in recent years is a tendency I refer to as Landlordism. It is the frenzy and mindset that wholeheartedly believes in the opportunity to become an instant millionaire through the property market, cleverly expressed by the prime minister as The Promise of Australia. It is also the social contract between individual and state that guarantees the organisation of state forces to this end.

This tendency permeates all through society. Property developers will “convince” corrupt public officials to transfer public land to private developments. The developments are small, cramped, and in many cases crumbling – no place any person actually wants to live. A deregulated certification scheme has served to further reduce costs and fatten pockets.

And on the demand side of the equation, the logic of a system whereby riches are guaranteed by a house deposit has become sacrosanct to the electorate, who will continue to vote for the party promising never-ending return as long so long as they do not pop the bubble.

Labor did not reject the logic of this structure and propose an egalitarian alternative, it only seeking to clip the excesses of the individualistic market organisation. It determined, perhaps correctly, that any further proposal would be political suicide.

It turned out that even tweaks to this framework are political suicide, despite it not being in the best interest of the vast majority of the population. And the only feasible explanation is that false consciousness, that desire, that entitlement.

The Australian Dream is that by virtue of your citizenship of a nation built on stolen land, you may retire and live luxuriously, rewarded by the market for your hard work and discipline, based on the fundamentally unjust structure of capitalism. It is the manifest entitlement to other’s money, be it through tax concessions or weekly rent, to pay the debt for your wealth accumulation.

The idea that Labor was not radical enough in its platform, rather being a liberal-minded tweaking of the dials, is mostly correct. However, given the state of political consciousness, I don’t believe that a radical platform would be supported automatically, based purely on the false consciousness of the present.

Left politics cannot simply reframe this desire for ownership in egalitarian terms. The right to house ownership through market mechanisms is profoundly neoliberal. The right to guaranteed housing for all, regardless of means, should be the fundamental aim.

Developing a strategy to challenge this behaviour is difficult. At its foundation is not only the idea that housing is viewed primarily a speculative asset rather than a necessity, but also that individuals are right to organise housing through a market mechanism, and also possess the right to profit from housing as a commodity. In the boom of a bull market, this can seem sacrosanct.

If there’s anything in modern Australia more destined to fail, it is an argument appealing to morality and justice. Sadly this is rather empirical. However, this sentiment only holds true when the market is rosy.

Rather then, as always, we should look to the people who are priced out, bound to lifetime mortgages, or outright harmed by the existing market structure.

To put it clearly, what good is campaigning for a jobs guarantee, a housing guarantee, or mass nationalisation of previously-public goods, when the vast majority of the electorate simply disbelieve its possibility? What grounds can one hope for a radical change of heart when the vast majority has been utterly convinced that the Greens are the apex of lunacy?

It would be a mistake believe the oft-cited liberal orthodoxy that people naively believe the rhetoric of right-wing populism, abandoning their rational senses and so-called sensible, centrist democracy to seize with force a whimsical nostalgia of a time long lost. Rather than infantilising the electorate, dismissing their real material concerns and discounting their agency, we should consider the motion of politics as an extreme representation of their values, values represented and encouraged over the past 40 years.

In a sense, it was inevitable. The rightward shift in political ideology over the past years in the imperial core and satellites is precisely due both the extreme individualisation of society post-neoliberalism, and the inherent white supremacy and exploitative nature of the capitalist mode of production.

History demonstrates that fascism is the manifestation of capitalism in decay, expressed as virulent revulsion of the left. And there’s no illusion our trajectory is anything other than that.

The election of the Liberals is testament to the sheer anxiety this settler-colonial society feels towards the crisis of capitalism, with a distinctly capitalist response. Privatise the gain, socialise the loss. Enjoy the fruit of other people’s labour, shift all negative externalities onto the lesser, and claim the right to live luxuriously at the expense of everyone else.

There is no successful left that does not dismantle both these historical forces. And there is no dismantling either capitalism nor white supremacy without first building its alternative, or at least belief that there is one.