His last act was to make us all wait. A defeated, failed prime minister gummed up the constitutional machinery of the nation as best he could for most of a day, while he attended to who knows what.

In the end, of course, the hours of silence – hours which even a freshly deposed Kevin Rudd, for all his egotism, did not allow himself – turned out to be simple petulance, reportedly underpinned by a hangover. And this in turn came from his prodigious, now wounded sense of entitlement.

To go with good grace would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of others’ claims: those of colleagues or citizens. Instead, in the final hours before he is said to have faxed his resignation to the governor general, he demonstrated the core meaning of his premiership. And that, simply, is a deep, even existential resentment.

Every last joule of Tony Abbott’s political energy, every last howl of his most committed supporters, was derived from what philosopher Lauren Berlant once called “the scandal of ex-privilege”, including “rage at the stereotyped peoples who have appeared to change the political rules of social membership, and, with it, a desperate desire to return to an order of things deemed normal”.

The “normality” which has been lost in Australia and other western democracies is the unquestioned social and political primacy of white men. Recent decades have seen new kinds of political claims emerge, and a plurality of values, cultures and lifestyles. The rules of the game have, after long struggles, shifted.

Rather than respond to this with accommodation, negotiation and hospitality, much of the right have elected to fight a prolonged culture war that demands the return of white, male, heterosexual authority, something that never truly existed in the way they imagine it.

For 30 years they have pursued this odd and catastrophic project. Abbott was the avatar of those in the Liberal party and the media whose every political commitment derives from this reactionary impulse.

Abbott was initially pushed forward to replace Turnbull, who presumed to negotiate with Labor in order to do something about climate change. In this, his backers from the Liberal party’s hard right, and their cheerleaders in the media, could only see a crypto-communist plot to further restrain the freedoms of people like them.

Just like with Aboriginal reconciliation, they could only read it as an attack on the colonial and capitalist legacy they see as the source of all propriety (not to mention property). And, of course, Abbott’s point-blank refusal to commit to any meaningful response to climate change was the reason they put him there. He would make them feel like things were no longer slipping beyond their control.

The sense of lost control feeds into other elements of Abbott’s entirely negative and destructive legacy.

The sense of lost control feeds into other elements of Abbott’s entirely negative and destructive legacy. In the parting speech that he finally delivered, he was considerate enough to mention a few highlights.

One was a royal commission into his political opponents, the credibility of which is currently in tatters. Another was his success in “stopping the boats”. A lot of people, including the opposition, have connived in giving this a humanitarian gloss. But it has only kept desperate people where they are, corrupted our neighbours, and perhaps even branches of our own government.

He also harped, cynically, on dubious threats to national security. Unfortunately for him, the button that Howard regularly pressed in times of trouble no longer appears to be connected to anything.

Even in his many failures and missteps he revealed his toxic nostalgia. The effort to repeal laws around racial vilification – which, like so much else, stalled in the Senate – were not about free speech, but the freedom of white men to hand out racial abuse.

The disastrous decision to reinstate imperial honours, his inability to anticipate how it would be mocked, showed how he regarded the trappings of Anglo-imperial power not as something we’d moved on from, but as something that had been cruelly stripped away by his enemies in the culture wars.

Even his physique answered to 19th century notions of muscular Christianity and a masculine ideal premised on imperial service. He tried to enact these martial dreams in the usual place, the Middle East, begging to be asked by the current imperial power to commit Australian bodies to an action that will at best be a marginal component of a marginal mission. What a strange fate for a post-colonial nation: to be ruled by a Victorian relic.

The “scandal” that propelled Abbott’s early political life was women taking control over their reproductive lives. The scandal that propelled him to power was the spectacle of a woman – unmarried, childless – occupying the lodge. Anyone who denies the mobilising power of antifeminism in what happened to Gillard probably doesn’t look too hard at grassroots conservatism.

The most enduring image of his political career deserves to be that of him addressing an ageing crowd on the lawns of parliament house, with signs behind him calling her a “bitch” and a “witch”.

For the tinpot Tea Party who gathered there on that day – for a rally against the carbon tax – Gillard was every woman who had advanced in the workplace at the expense of some white guy like themselves, and every change that had made such outrages possible. While Gillard’s record in office on core feminist issues is questionable, such distinctions are lost to those immersed in the euphoria of resentment.

Following his disastrous tenure, which did nothing but advance this bizarre, reactionary inversion of identity politics, Abbott’s parting speech failed to acknowledge the incoming prime minister. Instead, he pressed the themes of honour and service.

After all the wreckage he caused, after all the self-indulgence and self-absorption, after the needless pain caused by policies designed to please the kind of senator who worries about halal food or bestiality, Abbott left office feeling sore and under-appreciated. He was still demanding the gratitude he felt he was owed. His final will and testament was the airing of yet more grievances, one last flourish of this strange and selfish man’s trademark politicised self-pity.