“The first lost decade since the 1860s”: that’s the chilling economic assessment of the UK from the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney. People are angry, Carney recognised in a speech yesterday, in a world that “amplifies the rewards of the superstar and the lucky … but what of the frustrated and the frightened?”

The benefits of economic progress had been unevenly felt. A stagnation in wages with no precedent for a century and a half is set to continue. Younger people have been disproportionately hit. Indeed, Carney’s speech underlines the fact that Britain, like much of the western world, is in the midst of a grave crisis.

A sense of optimism – that the years ahead will be better than those gone by – is very important to human beings. When it vanishes, when “tomorrow” becomes a byword for deepening insecurity, of fears yet unrealised, there are profound consequences. That has been the story of 2016: it’s what connects Donald Trump’s triumph to Brexit to the surging French National Front and the Austrian far right’s rise and (thankful) near miss last weekend.

This is a crisis of radical proportions, and as such it has only radical solutions. This is a critical point. The champions of the Blair-Clinton centrism of the 1990s – rather than addressing the reasons for their own terrible political plight – lash out at the new left for being impractical to the point of delusion. But the old politics, which was technocratic and managerial in its approach, simply has no answers to the scale of the problems we now face.

There’s the sheer scale of inequality in the west, which wasn’t addressed when social democratic parties dominated western Europe from the mid-1990s onwards; the record stagnation in living standards; the ideologically charged cuts which have failed on their own terms across Europe. There’s the disappearance of secure, skilled jobs, and the failure to replace them, leaving entire communities behind – from the northeast of England to the rust belt of the United States. A younger generation that can expect a worse lot in life than their parents – without precedent for perhaps a century – because of everything from a housing crisis to a lack of secure jobs to the burden of debt. The failures of the private market, from the financial crisis to Britain’s deeply unpopular privatised utilities. A political elite who are widely regarded as being stooges of corporate interests (a sentiment Trump cynically exploited, until he himself stuffed his own nascent administration with former Goldman Sachs employees). A technological revolution that – unlike those that came before – could destroy far more jobs than it creates, breeding even further insecurity in the workforce.

We could go on. After the second world war, there was a concerted attempt by western governments to banish insecurity. But insecurity is once again one of the defining features of our age. That’s why it’s so frustrating – unforgivable even – when the new left doesn’t get its act together, when we fail to communicate in a way that is accessible and relates to people’s everyday needs, when sectarian groups try to hijack grassroots movements, when we put proving our own purity ahead of reaching out to the unpersuaded.

The old Blair-Clinton project has no answers that match the scale of the crisis – but if the left doesn’t get its act together, then the populist right will continue to sweep the western world. Does the future belong to the Trumps, the Farages, the Le Pens? I don’t think so. But it’s up to the left to prove it doesn’t.