Among the many failures surrounding the general election last week was a colossal failure of the imagination. Something went very wrong, not just in the polling booths or in the tight little team that surrounded Ed Miliband or in the predictions of the now entirely preposterous pollsters (landlines?), but in the hivemind of the left, or the leftovers, or whatever we call ourselves. And this thing was the inability to imagine difference.

Much posturing occurs in bourgeois circles about respecting difference, alongside talk of the value of empathy. Empathy is the all-purpose salve. So where has this been extended to people who voted “the wrong way”? “Who are these people, and when will they be put to death?” appears to have been the initial reaction to the election. The second was: “Christ, we may need some of them back on board.” And the third was the word “aspiration”, repeated as if it were a satanic chant. Gaunt Blairites ventured out in daylight again in a deluded attempt to turn back time.

Grief is a complex emotion all right. No one can call time on someone else’s reaction by cheerily saying, “Don’t mourn, organise” when it is no longer clear what the organising principles are. One of these, I suggest, might be not to hate people who are slightly different from you. It may, indeed, be possible to leave London and venture only to the People’s Republic of Brighton and Hove or fly to Scotland and simply avoid the rest of the country in order to maintain one’s illusions of purity. The US, after all, has those awkward bits that so many fly over from east coast to west coast, full of white trash, rednecks and Republicans. Is that where we are heading?

The utter lack of comprehension about why people vote Tory, or indeed don’t vote at all, has been galling. Mea culpa – I indulge in my share of Tory-bashing, but I keep it to politicians not civilians. As I grew up in a working-class Tory-voting household, the idea that everyone good just “is” Labour is anathema. I was arguing with my mum about this until the day she died. We always thought each other wrong and moved on to more pressing subjects. Years of screaming at her over the turkey that she herself was a turkey voting for Christmas did not change her voting habits. She just went out for a fag and moaned to the neighbours that I was “still against everything”.

Of course, I had diagnosed her with that everyday ailment “false consiousness”. This is still how most of the left operates. We have the truth, we know what is best and we will enlighten you, awaken you from your slumbers and you will be grateful.

That people may then say, “Actually, I am all right as I am – go away” is hardly surprising. But it is this view of a passive electorate that has to be activated by some higher power that is itself a problem. The Labour party’s top-down structure is unappealing. Much of its internal process is incomprehensible. Its language wavers between jargon and meaninglessness. Alarm bells rang in my head a few weeks ago when a care worker asked me what austerity meant. She understood the concept, obviously; it was just not a word she used.

Something has gone very wrong when in the very places where austerity is much more than a concept, people have turned away from Labour. There are those who will valiantly try to rebuild the party. It may not be possible. Look at Pasok in Greece to see how parties of the left can fossilise.

The insistence that we return to Blairism is depressing and a sign of denial about what Blairism was a response to: Thatcherism, with its core values about the supremacy of the market cloaked in the language of individual choice. The unleashing of the market has continued to undermine the postwar settlement, a way of organising society in which people identified themselves by class. Technology has further ruptured this class identification as people cluster in networks and not hierarchies.

If anyone wants to listen to the so-called “shy Tories”, what you will often hear is not talk of aspiration but a desire to be left alone by the state – even a deep suspicion of it. This contradiction for anyone on the left has long been apparent. Imagining that all good reform comes from the state and everything bad from outside just does not correspond to people’s lived experience.

Class solidarity cannot be imposed from the outside. As core Labour votes go to Ukip or the SNP, the metropolitan left tells us consistently that nationalism is not a concept worth organising around, but then has a kind of Syriza-in-Surrey fantasy.

I am not so sure. And I am only a bit English, but again I think of my flag-waving mother, who nursed my “uncle” when he had Aids, who was half of a mixed-race couple when that was much frowned upon. She believed that the Tories would enable her to do things and that Labour would stop her doing them. I called her stupid many times when I was a teenager. I had to get over myself. Now we all have to get over ourselves.

• This article was amended on 15 May 2015 to correct the waivers/wavers homophone.

