Let's face it: increasingly it feels as if the Tories will win the next election, possibly outright. Yes, there remain serious obstacles to Conservative success. But look at recent polls. History apparently suggests that even a five-point deficit for any Tory government will translate into a seven-point lead by the time an election campaign reaches its climax – and with the political dividend from economic recovery, not to mention the fact that coalition government has worked surprisingly well, they look like a wise bet.

Such stuff is probably best left to the psephologists. What underlines the sense that Tories are on an upswing is the fact that they, and the right more widely, have come up with a solid vision of the future, and may yet persuade a sufficient share of the public to buy in.

As proved by the budget, the basic idea is simple enough: they divide society into those who think they can cope with globalisation and those who cannot, and then shower the former with praise and modest enticements – while clobbering the latter in the service of political popularity. Better to be a striver than a benefit claimant. Better, too, to play your part in what David Cameron calls the global race – manifested in George Osborne's beloved infrastructure projects – than to admit its impossibility. For all its awfulness, I understand that version of what lies ahead; indeed, I can almost feel it.

And the left? Another lesson of history is that Labour wins when it does a good impression of owning the future – witness 1945, 1964 and 1997. On a bad day, though, it can feel like many of the people at the top of the party want to return to some mushy, statist version of social democracy redolent of 1993. Others seem to wish it was still 2006. And too much of the wider left is still rattling out the battles of the 1980s. The academic and Lib Dem peer Ralf Dahrendorf famously said that the SDP wanted "a better yesterday": the same is true of 90% of the left, not just here, but all over Europe, and beyond.

What Marx and Engels would call the mode of production has long since changed. But have enough people on the left actually noticed? A little more than 25 years ago, some of its brighter minds alighted on the idea of post-Fordism, and bundled it up in the notion of New Times: a conceptualisation of societies moving away from organised capitalism into "disorganised capitalism", and the end of the left's home comforts.

They wondered what a more plural, fragmented reality would mean for progressive politics: some eventually embraced the dead end that was New Labour, while others resisted, and carried on asking their questions. Two decades on there is still too much truth to the contention made in the "New Times" issue of Marxism Today, published in October 1988: "It is the right that now appears modern, radical, innovative … It is the left that seems backward-looking, conservative, bereft of new ideas and out of time."

This runs much wider than the Labour party, out into the people and organisations who think of themselves as "radical", but usually fall short. Listen to their current noises off, as they demand "a massive house-building programme", or the renationalisation of the railways. The venerable Ken Loach suggests their task is to belatedly make the Labour manifesto of 1945 "into a reality". The left's causes – greater equality, a public realm as distinct from the private market, security in an insecure world – are as urgent as ever, but this kind of politics stands no chance of advancing them.

Three huge changes highlight how far the left has fallen behind. First, there is the changed nature of work. Politicians and commentators still crow on about the glories of "jobs", as if human beings achieve their highest state of being while clocking in and out of posts they might keep for decades at a time (as proved by this week's hype about full employment, even George Osborne tries this one). But that world has gone. The right has a simple answer: adjust to the new reality, or sink. The challenge for the left lies in such ideas as a basic citizen's income, organisations more rooted in wider society than any workplace, and the imperative to pressure supra-national institutions – the EU, chiefly – to keep capital in check, rather than cut deals with individual employers.

Second, there is the arrival of an ageing society. Quite apart from the spiralling costs of social care and pensions, this highlights profound social problems to which traditional left orthodoxy has few answers. Whither that same preoccupation with paid work when so many of us will have to be carers? How will we address loneliness when all those modern singletons turn grey? What does preventive care entail in practice? Again, the right has a crude but effective pitch: work like hell now, for fear of what might happen later. A big part of an alternative answer will lie in self-sustaining social networks: a revival of neighbourliness and the extended family, as well as people exercising together, sharing their experiences of chronic conditions, and more. Target-driven, behemothic government will have nothing to do with that at all.

Underlying all this is one of the biggest questions we face: that of the state and how it sits in a society where voice, influence and spontaneous initiative are now expected as a matter of course. Once again, the right's prescription is simple enough: they relentlessly hack government back, and ask often illusory little platoons to plug the gaps.

Some left-ish people, meanwhile, are thinking of something different: hence that recent letter to the Guardian organised by the avowedly pluralistic, forward-thinking Compass, and signed by a range of people from other pressure groups and thinktanks. Among other things, it advocated "giving away power and resources to our nations, regions, cities, localities and, where possible, directly to the people". Too bad that it was greeted with standard-issue moans. Diane Abbott, for example, claimed that "ordinary people just want good services delivered competently", and tried that canard whereby inviting people to participate is reducible to "interminable meetings". For someone who's such a prodigious user of Twitter, that's a rather strange thing to say.

When our best political hope still goes by the archaic name of the Labour party, this shows that the left is still far too mechanistic. It needs to talk about care and family, where we live and what we do beyond work, and how we can achieve at least a measure of control over what happens to us – and come up with a credo built on the idea that people can do more than graft, blow their savings on a Lamborghini, and then drop dead. Who knows? You could even call it socialism.