Here’s a phrase that used to mean something else: Social cohesion. It described the project of building a society where people from different backgrounds could live together, contribute, and belong.

Now it’s a bludgeon. The far right captured it, filled it with their story, and weaponised it against the very communities it was supposed to protect and lift.

The response of those who care was to fiddle and find new words: Endless workshopping about semantics and terminology among allies who argue more than they cooperate. But retreating from a frame doesn’t neutralise it. It cedes it. Opponents didn’t need better language. They needed a better story. And they got there first.

Recent Essential polling found 58 per cent of voters – including 45 per cent of Labor voters and a third of Greens voters – would be open to voting for One Nation at a future federal election. Not rusted-on conservatives. Parents. People under 55. People who think the country is heading in the wrong direction and becoming more divided.

These are people that needed to be reached. Instead, in many instances, they were written off.

The populist right, manosphere and related polarisation is surging, not because Australians are suddenly more racist – though racism remains one of its most damaging expressions.

It’s surging because a generation has discovered that housing is unaffordable, wages don’t cover the life their parents had, public services are deteriorating, and wealth is pooling at the top. All the while being more isolated and unable to draw the same connections to those outside whatever their bubble.

When the middle audience looked to those who should be offering answers, they’ve found strict values-based messaging that spoke past their experience, and that judged their worldview instead of trying to understand it.

Two competing mental models of social cohesion are operating in Australia right now. One is assimilationist: You come here, you shed your identity, you become like us. The other is inclusive: We build the structures and institutions that support people to contribute when they arrive and, as a result, we all benefit. The people who captured the cohesion narrative are exploiting the first model. Many of those who care about the second only ever spoke to people who already agreed.

Here’s the even more confronting part. Many of those drawn to populist politics genuinely believe they are the aggrieved party – and that it is the organisations working on inclusion that are dividing the nation. Dismiss that and you learn nothing useful.

And not all of it is misdirected economic pain. Some concerns about how we live together are real – imported conflicts, homophobia in schools, gender segregation. Pretending these don’t exist, or that raising them is automatically bigoted, pushes people towards those who will at least name a problem.

“Migrants are taking your jobs and your homes” is a bad answer. But it is an answer.

In the absence of a compelling alternative that connects economic fairness to social cohesion, it fills the vacuum. You cannot contest the populist story on cohesion without a credible story about housing, wages, taxation and public investment. Values-based messaging alone asks people to care about abstract principles when they’re worried about paying rent. It has failed. It will keep failing.

Too much advocacy in this space has become a politics of exceptionalism – moral judgment instead of persuasion, activating the choir instead of the congregation, campaigning for supporters while ignoring the persuadable middle. We have made enemies of people who might otherwise have been sympathetic.

Instead, let’s step back and ask why a significant cohort of Australians are turning away from inclusive responses to real economic grievances and towards movements that channel anger into anti-migrant sentiment and democratic erosion.

The task isn’t to find language we’re more comfortable with, or that makes us feel good. It’s not another glossary. It’s not another workshop with ourselves. It’s to listen. Genuinely. Without judgment. Including to people whose views are confronting.

If we assume everyone drawn to populist politics is simply a bigot, we learn nothing – and the people who benefit from division keep winning.

Peter Stahel is managing director and co-owner of Essential, a progressive research and communications company, and a former Greens adviser

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