Something is indeed missing. With the death of each person who sacrificed for a cause, the absence of purpose in modern politics is as keenly felt as the loss of the individual. The vacuum left has now been filled with all manner of dishonesty, as well as an assiduously cultivated fear of the other. In the United States, the lack of an alternative has left many people marginalised. Disengaged and angry, they are looking for something to blame.

The accepted economic orthodoxy has reduced many to a miserable existence, yet timorous leaders and traditional parties remain slow to embrace the possibilities that radical departure from the status quo could bring. The lack of alternative has condemned us to a politics of gradualism, a language of equivocation, and a body politic that puts elected representatives' interests ahead of the people's welfare.

One wonders how many of the unregistered, non-voters in Detroit would have been engaged had self-described socialist Bernie Sanders been the Democratic Party's nomination for United States president. Had there been a more radical alternative in the presidential race, one wonders whether Donald Trump would have been as successful using race as an outlet for people's anger. History shows where this path will take us, and we are running hard in that direction.

In Australia, too, the tendency to use populist fear-mongering to distract from economic problems is evident. With the mining boom wasted and a fraught economic transition under way, many Australians feel the pain of stagnant wage growth, insecure work and escalating costs of living. Their isolation, disengagement, hopelessness and frustration leaves open the opportunity for real change. People want something other than a failed economic concept that has corrupted our society.

Free-market ideology has somehow survived. Somehow, people accept that it is natural for economic growth to be distributed unevenly. Somehow, it is acceptable that workers pay the price for economic transition. Somehow, escalating power bills have brought renewable energy, rather than privatisation, into question. Because there has been no clearly articulated alternative

Our desire for greater equality, opportunity, freedom and justice currently bears no name. Voters would respond favourably to someone willing to condemn the economic orthodoxy of our generation, even though most now agree that neoliberalism has failed spectacularly. There is no Australian Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. There is no Australian Jacinda Ardern. Socialism, described by the editors of Dissent in 1954 as "the name of our desire", remains a dirty word in Australia.

In an attack on Malcolm Turnbull, fellow Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop accused him of dragging their party "into the socialist gutter". Labor's socialist objective is viewed by many within the party as an anachronism. If you were born in the year Labor last tried to nationalise an industry, when Ben Chifley tried unsuccessfully to nationalise banks, you would have reached the promised age by now. Too conservative and timid to contemplate real change, we watch idly as social and economic fissures become irreconcilable ruptures.

"On the darkest nights, stars shine more brightly," Jesse Jackson said at Franklin's funeral. We are sleeping through the darkest of nights, with the promise of many more to come. But there is an alternative to attacks on the vulnerable as an outlet for our anger, to the hopelessness that leaves US citizens unregistered to vote, and voters in Australia happy to draw pictures on their ballot paper. That which is missing must be found.

Andrew Hunter was a speechwriter for former South Australian premier Jay Weatherill.