What a bizarre situation to find ourselves in: when Theresa May called a snap election, the question wasn’t even whether or not to despair. Obviously I’m in despair, and so are you. Just admit it. Rather, it was in the nature and extent of the despair. We have an unelected Conservative prime minister enjoying a lead in the polls that is higher for an incumbent than at any time since some younger voters have been alive.

Theresa May, the vicar’s daughter, was meant to be the George Washington of probity; her straightforwardness was putatively her redeeming feature, and here she is, doing the thing she has expressly been saying she wouldn’t do, ever since she’s been in post. Since their 2015 election win, the Tories have steered us straight into oncoming traffic, to the certain destruction of our international standing, the probable destruction of our prosperity, the possible destruction of our kingdom.

To cement which outrageous victory, they now want a rematch, only this time against an opposition with radical bearing and retail policies, the most unelectable combination imaginable. How can the Conservatives lose? Yet what breadth and depth of damage can they do if they win? Part of me wants to reconcile now to their victory, just so I don’t wake up on 9 June feeling 100 times worse than I did last 24 June after the EU referendum, 1,000 times worse than 9 November after Donald Trump’s victory, and a million times worse than I did after the 2015 general election, which now looks like an election picnic.

The Conservatives could win by the same margin, by a greater margin, or could walk away with 400 seats. The Labour party could have a leadership contest after the election, and that could revivify it, or it could just mire them all in fresh grievance, new divisions. The campaign itself could draw out some interesting debates, or it could be fought on the ugliest, most coarse and foolish terms, all pomp and patriotism, nostalgia, self-regard and the kind of rhetoric that would be punctured by the first sniff of a laugh and so can allow no humour.

Obviously, the best way to kick off an election campaign of doom is to float some half-arsed optimism in a domestic environment, then spend all night fighting about it, in the company of two French people who think François Fillon and Marine Le Pen are just as bad as each other (forget about them, for now: they are just there to compound the despair). “Yes. This could be totally awful,” says Paul Hilder, who runs the UK arm of Crowdpac, which crowdfunds for grassroots political campaigns. “But the surest way to get the most awful outcome is to spend the next six weeks going: ‘This is totally awful.’” Which has to be strike one for the cheer-up argument; as awful as anything is, your despair will make it worse. And from a psepho-psychological point of view, what is the point of defeatism except to protect yourself from disappointment? And does it protect you? Not really.

Groups and movements such as the Women’s March show the success of pursuing big goals. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

Strike two is that May is fragile: she knows it. How is it possible to march into this election, of a suddenness and importance that is unprecedented in my voting lifetime, and refuse to debate it? The tools to expose her weakness are readily available, at the level of the citizen. She may be able to withstand almost any attack from her majesty’s opposition, but an activist such as Michael Walker, launching a petition calling on her to take part in a TV debate, like this one, could put significant pressure on her (if enough people sign it).

For some techie optimism, refer to John Curtice, the go-to academic for comprehensible psephology, who has spelt out how difficult it would be for the prime minister to increase her majority. Their “working majority of 12 achieved at the last election was won off the back of … winning Lib Dem seats”. That stunt is unrepeatable: they only have nine seats anyway, and as the only people arguing, in a sustained and united way, against hard-Brexit, they are expecting to win rather than lose. There is no Scotland or Northern Ireland to play with. And there simply are not that many marginal seats left. “A lot of the Labour seats,” Curtice writes, “are incredibly safe, there are perhaps 17 marginal seats with a majority less than 1,000.” He concludes that May would struggle to get a majority of much more than 100, and that’s if her lead remains unchanged, and nobody finds any way to exploit her weaknesses.

No, wait, it is not just signing a petition and trusting the pointy-heads: we’ve been doing that for years. This is an incredibly volatile moment, anything could happen; but if you want agency, you have to seize it. Neal Lawson, head of Compass, which is campaigning for a progressive alliance, has said: “This is about taking the political future of the country out of the hands of the politicians and putting it back into the hands of the voters.” This comes up repeatedly, from grassroots organisers, online activists, think-and-do tanks: that we, as voters, have been effectively outsourcing our democratic agency to a political class for long enough. It worked OK for a bit; it had its ups and downs; but now, like G4S in front of a select committee explaining how it cocked up the Olympics, the political class is no longer up to it, and it is time to insource.

How does a progressive alliance work? (If you have a residual prejudice against the word “progressive” because it sounds both worthy and carcinogenic, you can go with “anti-Tory alliance” or, my personal favourite, “coalition of the losers”.) It could be straight tactical voting, which is what Gina Miller, who spearheaded the legal challenge against an unopposed Brexit, is crowdfunding for. Compass is also setting up a vote-swap site to make that happen. There was informal tactical voting in the 1997 election, soft pacts between Labour and the Lib Dems, which played a significant role in Tony Blair’s first landslide victory. Never underestimate how well people cooperate, and how trustworthy they are, when they want the same thing. We know there are 49 seats that, if people voted the right way, would swap from being Tory to being Labour or Lib Dem. There are another 40-odd seats to defend that would become impregnable if the progressive side got its act together.

That data will be published within the next few days, whereupon the onus is on the voters: however an alliance looks, it cannot be a stitch up from above, parties agreeing not to field candidates against one another and then denying voters a choice. It has to be bottom-up mobilisation, people from multiple parties holding hustings to strategically support the candidate who is best placed to win. You would call them local primaries, but realistically, you book a vast hall, hold a huge hustings, and use a vote in to determine who the movement is going to back. It would be a little like the Tea Party movement, except British, and not in the service of evil.

The internet still feels to me like a place you go to get practical things such as signatures and money; I forget about things such as relationships and networks, which are more amorphous but also more important. “We’re seeing an explosion of interest from candidates and campaigns in crowd-funding on Crowdpac,” Hilder says. “Independents, Lib Dems, soft left, centre left …”

Labour MP John Woodcock has said he will campaign for his party even though he has no faith in Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Laura Lean/PA

Even though anybody who said they were ready for this election would be lying, there is organisation, fundraising and campaigning in the service of a broad left coalition: Compass’s Together We Win, Paddy Ashdown and Martha Lane Fox’s More United, Pat Kane and Indra Adnan’s Denmark-inspired The Alternative. The old-school part of me wants them all to merge, or cede to the best-organised, but that is not the post-networked political way: if you look at the US, different movements, such as Knock Every Door, Black Lives Matter, and the Women’s March use distributed organising methods. I’m not 100% sure of what that means: I think, broadly, that you choose your big goal, pursue it single-mindedly, but always stay open to alliances where your goals intersect. “People step up to big goals,” Hilder says. “They’re not very interested in marginally alleviating bad things.”

To return to traditional politics, which always gets a bad rap when it comes to big ideas for a hopeful new world, very soon after the election was announced, Labour MP John Woodcock put a video on Facebook saying he could campaign for his party even though he had no faith in Jeremy Corbyn. Woodcock doesn’t believe in a progressive alliance. He doesn’t believe in a new politics as expressed by Corbyn. He would dispute, I think, the analysis that everything is the fault of the political class. And I think if we talked for very long about what has gone wrong and what has gone right, we would disagree about almost everything. But something in his tone woke me up, and felt kind of, sod it, the exhaust is on fire, we may as well say what we mean, and drive as fast as we can. On the phone the following day, he says: “The Tories are 20 points ahead in the polls. That makes us underdogs, nationally, and definitely for me, locally. I’m probably going to lose. If there was ever a time to be honest about what you want for the future of this country, and what direction it should take, it’s now.”

Neal Lawson, from a different direction, says the same thing. “This cannot be another press conference, report, press-release election campaign. There is a moral pressure to do this differently, and it’s only going to get stronger.”

And if you are chucking out those certainties of procedure, why not chuck out all the certainties: it is not about leaders, it is not about parties, it is about who the person is in your constituency who is worth electing. How can you find them? How can you help them? This is our country, this is our children’s future, these are our jobs, this is stuff that matters. We are not just spectators. That is what makes this election worthwhile.