When my granddad was a boy, you could get a home loan, order furniture, or buy a side of meat at a store run by the state government (of, forgive me, Queensland).

When my dad was growing up, government actually guaranteed everyone a job. At least, every man. In the shadow of fascism and communism, both Labor and conservative governments were willing to go to almost any lengths to mitigate the perceived threat of mass (male) unemployment.

Idle hands, you see, are the devil's playthings. Or so the argument went.

In return we basically trusted government. We argued about a lot, but at the end of the day Australians agreed - the way to change the country was to change the government, as Paul Keating put it.

The ballot box, not the bullet, was the way to resolve political disputes.

That trust was already breaking down before COVID-19. But I think there's a risk the virus crisis could be the final nail in the coffin of majority government in this country.

Last week, we learned that over 1 million Australians are measured as unemployed. The jobless figure ticked over into seven digits, seasonally adjusted, in the Australian Bureau of Statistics' July figures.

COVID-19 has given us the worst joblessness since the Great Depression.

According to new ABS data the 600,000 people the virus has made jobless were disproportionately our country's lowest-paid employees. [In a weird statistical anomaly, this has driven an increase in average hourly income, though wage growth is stagnant.]

Which, in a way, is a good thing. Hopefully business will be more willing to quickly rehire the nation's cheapest employees.

In another way, we've slugged people who were already struggling with yet another financial blow. The nation's least stable have again suffered disproportionately from a crisis not of their control. They're getting angrier and angrier. Maybe this final injury - after years of insult, uncertainty, denial of housing, wage stagnation, service cuts, and a failed and even fraudulent Centrelink income support system - will be the last straw.

Economists usually talk about the long-term impact of unemployment in terms of productivity. A productive person who has been unemployed for a long time will be relatively less skilled, less confident, even less mentally or physically healthy, and therefore will work less efficiently.

But I worry about another cost as well: political radicalism.

Australians were already pretty contemptuous of their governments even before COVID-19. The Australian Election Study shows our trust in government has gone from 52 per cent in 1969 to just 25 per cent last year, the lowest number ever recorded. And the further you go from a capital city, the less trust in government you will find.

We're voting less consistently than we ever have. Where once 72 per cent of us told the AES we "always" voted for the same party, today just 39 per cent do.

As a result, our parliaments are changing - though not as much as we'd like. Over 95 per cent of the seats in the lower house of Federal Parliament are held by the two major parties. Just three-quarters of us voted for them. One interpretation: angry people are voting for change and then not getting it.

Because of our single-member-electorate system, parties are relying more and more on the preferences of third-party voters. That is, we're becoming more and more likely to elect parties we hate the least, rather than making an affirmative choice for a platform we prefer.

Politicians have noticed this. Negative campaigns are more negative and personal - and dishonest - than they have ever been, at least on my TV and in my letterbox.

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Could the COVID-19 crisis accelerate a race to the bottom?

Could we have government defined not by how to help people but by which figure of hate is less despised?

Humans are not good at being jobless. We need the material things work brings, of course, but employment also gives us identity.

Unemployment has a negative effect not just on Mum and Dad but the kids, the neighbours, the local business, the suburb, the town, the state and ultimately Australia. Mass unemployment multiplies that effect.

That sort of mass directionless misery is a powerful political tool. In the hands of the less scrupulous it can be a dangerous one. Historically the Great Depression was a time of political extremism in Australia, with both communist and fascist groups active. NSW premier Jack Lang was sacked by the state's governor; tensions were high.

Unemployment rates unseen since the Great Depression could create the same sort of political polarisation and radicalism today.

Modern social media has already proven a very effective weapon for recruiting young, angry men in the hands of groups we now call the alt-right.

On the other hand, governments have the opportunity to win our trust back. If we can not just fend off this pandemic but help drive economic and social recovery on the other side of it, government could achieve the same sort of mandate past politicians dreamed of.