When was the last time anyone voted for anyone? Barack Obama in 2008. Maybe Kevin 07? Other than that, examples are thin on the ground. Australians didn't vote for anyone at all in 2010, voted against Labor (and certainly not for Abbott) in 2013, and have now very quickly fallen out of love with Malcolm Turnbull almost as thoroughly as we dropped Rudd. This year Americans will either vote against Donald Trump and put Hillary Clinton in the White House, or they'll vote against politics altogether and put Trump there. An average of national polls this week put Trump slightly ahead. Yes.

Meanwhile, Austria came within a whisker of electing a far-right president. It's largely a ceremonial role, but it's hardly a token result. Norbert Hofer is the kind of character who has now become an utterly familiar part of the political landscape: he has obvious counterparts in Slovakia, in Hungary, in Poland, in Switzerland, in Greece, in Sweden, in the Netherlands, even in France and Britain in the forms of Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage. Now note the ubiquitous description of these figures: anti-immigrant, anti-EU. It's a surging movement defined overwhelmingly by what it's against.

But here's the kicker: Hofer didn't even lose to a usual suspect. He lost to a fellow outlier: a former Green running as an independent, who'd be considered radical by the standards of conventional politics. But that's just it. Convention has been obliterated. Austria's two major parties, even with their votes combined, would have come third in this race. They didn't even get to the second-round runoff election. If the politics of the 20th century was a battle between liberalism and socialism, it's becoming something else entirely in the 21st. The problem is that's all it's becoming: something else.

Liberalism and socialism were competing, well-formed social visions. They identified grand aims, and proposed means of achieving them. They ground out theories about the role of government and the rights of the citizen. In short, they asked us to buy something positive, even if they were quite negative about each other. And in turns, they earned the approval of voting majorities.