'Tis the season to be cynical, apparently. Except, if you take in the full breadth of this year's post-election survey produced by the Australian National University, this season has lasted years. On every score, from our trust in government, to our feelings towards the major parties, to our belief that the government is even capable of affecting the economy, we're historically glum. But these trends are now long-term, in broad terms crashing after 2007.

It's a snapshot that distils the feeling of 2016, but points us to an important truth about it: that it has had a gestation period best measured in decades. Whatever the event you feel best captures the disaffection – Brexit, Trump, or our own turgid election campaign and the faltering government it has delivered – these were culminations rather than moments.

Illustration: Joe Benke

Certainly, there will always be local episodes making up each drama. As my colleague Michael Gordon has pointed out, the Australian case is bound up in Kevin Rudd's disastrous collapse. But there's something to be gleaned from the fact that there has been no recovery from this: that our political fidelity was so flimsy that we've dropped our bundle with it altogether. And that we're so far from alone in this attitude, which is clearly a global movement.

We're clearly in an anti-incumbent cycle. More than that, as seemingly everyone has observed, we're in an anti-establishment cycle. That has a profound meaning, though. It means we're railing not just against major parties or certain politicians. We're railing against anything that might count as an institution: politicians, business, unions, the media. Even democracy itself is no longer safe: perhaps the most startling statistic in ANU's survey is that only 60 per cent of us are prepared to say we're satisfied with it.