Anyone who wants to understand the social fissures still visible in Britain six months after the Brexit vote could do worse than travel to Lincolnshire.

Here, yes, you will hear about immigration, low wages and job security. But you will also be aware of something deeper, a shared longing for a sense of community and neighbourliness that locals say has dwindled to almost nothing.

On an eerily silent cul-de-sac in the middle of a new-looking housing development, a retired woman who voted leave tells of how her town and the wider world have changed over the past 30 years. “Not for the best,” she says. “On the news today, it was about older people feeling lonely. I’ve got my family here, but I still feel lonely. The neighbours – they’re nice, but they shut themselves away. Sometimes you never see a soul.”

This much we know: since the start of the neoliberal era in the early 1980s, the great economic changes that have ripped through western economies have led to an erosion of traditional communities. The factory towns and secure mass employment of yesteryear are long gone; institutions such as trade unions and the church – even the local pub – are locked into long-term decline. In the place of the collective spirit they underpinned has come a quicksilver individualism that just about benefits those who manage to keep up, but renders millions of lives unpredictable at best, untenable at worst.

The liberal left likes to think that it understands all this: “community” remains as much a part of its vernacular as “equality”, “opportunity” and the rest. But does it really understand what globalisation has done to the idea of community? The fact that millions of working-class voters who once formed the core constituency of progressive politics are shifting towards the populist right suggests not.

In retrospect, the roots of all this arguably lie in the ways that progressive politics began to change in the 1990s. When Tony Blair warned of the kind of capitalism that was “indifferent to tradition” and rewarded only people “swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change” – something he said Britain had to be ready to compete with – it was a sign that his quest to drastically reinvent the UK Labour party was now manifesting itself in veiled attacks on many of its supporters and their most basic beliefs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters at the Lindsey oil refinery in north Lincolnshire in 2009. Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/PA

In 1999, the writer and Blair adviser Charles Leadbeater provocatively exposed the clash between Blair’s modernity and notions of community. “Strong communities can be pockets of intolerance and prejudice,” he wrote. “Settled, stable communities are the enemies of innovation, talent, creativity, diversity and experimentation. They are often hostile to outsiders, dissenters, young upstarts and immigrants. Community can be too quickly become a rallying cry for nostalgia; that kind of community is the enemy of knowledge creation, which is the wellspring of economic growth.” Here was a theoretical division waiting to be made real; nearly two decades on, that is precisely what has happened.

But what to do about it? To say that none of this is easy is a risible understatement. Both the unreconstructed left and populist right offer visions of re-industrialisation – all newly opened coal mines and revived steel works – that are hardly realistic. More generally, going against the grain of the individualism that has been embedded in advanced economies for nearly 40 years will be an uphill task.

The left ought to rediscover its faith in some of the things that once embodied its collectivism – social housing, schools that serve communities rather than a specious idea of “choice” – while belatedly realising that they ought to be pulled away from the big, distant state, and returned to the grassroots.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lincoln city centre. Photograph: Charlotte Graham/Guzelian

And while understanding that old-fashioned job security will increasingly be a thing of the past, progressive politics should also fight the things that threaten to reduce it to nothing: the worst aspects of the so-called “gig” economy, the kind of self-employment that sets people against each other, and transfers risk from capital – which can bear it – to labour, which can’t.

Liberal-left politics, then, needs a drastic rethink. It could start with practical examples of the kind that begin at the base of society, and learn lessons that can then be applied at the summit of power. There is much to learn from Spain’s Podemos party, and the notion that without collective participation, the politics of equality and opportunity will not count for very much.

There is also much to learn from England’s burgeoning “flatpack democracy” movement, which aims to keep party politics out of the most local layers of government – town and parish councils – and to create a 21st-century version of an active citizenry, while focusing on such crucial local institutions as food banks and credit unions.

Other models abound: outside formal politics, there are myriad social projects, from local energy generation to peer-to-peer food networks, that have taken shape online and point to how the mixing of a social conscience and a sense of place can strengthen people’s attachment to their communities. The challenge for all of them, though, is to push beyond the usual middle-class suspects and begin to take what they do to the largely working-class places that most vividly embody the current political crisis.

In that sense, the biggest political task facing the left – politicians, activists and the thousands of bystanders who create that ongoing cacophony on social media – is attitudinal. Whenever people mourn the loss of community, it triggers the same thought: that after more than a century of styling itself as radical and iconoclastic, it is high time that progressives realise there is often nothing wrong with conservatism, albeit with a small C.

With the obvious caveats about racism and xenophobia, if people want to protect the most basic cornerstones of where they live, hang on to their sense of home and belonging, and have a dependable sense of the future, the political left ought to be their ally. Here, perhaps, lies the key to at least the beginnings of its revival. But as the two social partners in the left’s traditional marriage get ever closer to divorce, is it already too late?