Seen from a sofa, the world looks very different. And to listen to TV’s sofa pundits is to hear a very different election. They would have you believe that Labour and the Conservatives have rarely been further apart. That voters face “a clear choice” between a hard left and a Brextremist right, the inedible and the unpalatable. Plausible and conventional, it’s a classic sofa argument.

It also misses the critical change in this election.

To see what I mean, open Theresa May’s manifesto. Straight away, she gets stuck into the “burning injustices” of modern Britain, demands “a modern industrial strategy” and a country “in which work pays, with a higher national living wage and proper rights and protections at work”. Just five paragraphs in, and she’s using language that would have made Gordon Brown stutter. This is the same Tory prime minister who wants a cap on energy prices, talks about “a new centre ground”, and investigates the Victorian practices of the gig economy’s overlords.

Something bigger is happening here than the usual Punch v Judy. Kevin Farnsworth, a social scientist at the University of York, has put the manifestos for the two main parties from every election since 1945 through a cutting-edge piece of software – then asked it to assess how alike they were in concepts and phrases. The result? The Conservative manifesto is closer to Labour’s than at any point since the second world war.

Saying ain’t doing, of course. To see how little a promise can be worth, just ask Nick Clegg about tuition fees. Yet manifestos remain the clearest summaries of what each party is thinking. And in 2017, May’s Conservatives are a world away from the Cameroons. No more wishfulness about a “big society”, nor any bluster about a “long-term economic plan”.

May’s Conservatives worry about fairness, left-behind regions and depressed wages – just like Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. I can critique her solutions – indeed, give me a minute and I shall – but that one fact marks a massive break with previous elections.

Unlike when David Cameron battled Ed Miliband, the country this pair of party leaders see is more alike than it is different. Both Corbyn and May look out on a workforce that is still poorer than it was in 2008; provinces and nations whose economies are mere feedstock for the spivs up from London; and a public deemed too uncouth for the tailored professionals of Westminster.

Let me put it another way: this is Britain’s first post-crash election. Over the decade since the collapse of Northern Rock, one or both parties have pretended that things are basically fine; that the game isn’t rigged; that a few tweaks will fix the clearly malfunctioning economic model. This election is the first in which both party leaders drop the happy-clappy, catch up with just how bad things have got – and, at last, grope around for fixes.

The point at which the false beliefs of Westminster bumped into the solid reality of Britain will be marked up as June 2016, when the de-industrialised and disenfranchised communities of south Wales and the north-east delivered Brexit for the coffee-morning pensioners and bug-eyed libertarians of the south. Of all the contenders for the Tory leadership, May was the first to see that the vote was a register of popular discontent.

It takes decades for an ideology to die – but among the power elites of London, you can finally see it happening. What the cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert calls “The Long 90s” – the decade and a half that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ended with the collapse of RBS – – and that spanned Tony Blair, The Fast Show, garden decking, golden rules for public spending and an ever-growing finance sector – is coming to a close.

What replaces it is a much harder question. It took a Miliband for Labour to fess up that Britain’s economic model – for which, under Blair and Brown, it was heavily responsible – was broken. May is clearly way out in front of her party, and the confusion is daubed all over her manifesto. The Tories want to stand up for the little guy, while cutting taxes for big corporations: to invest more, even while sticking to an austerity programme. May clearly wants to leave open the option to raise taxes, while Michael Fallon believes that option should be shut down – now.

Mayism could mean Brexit Britain renaming itself Poundland – cheap goods and cheap workers – or it might mean a reversion to some kind of one-nation Toryism. Her party just doesn’t know. Were it not for the Tories’ slim majority, their crisis would be far more exposed. The sofa class don’t do political economy, more’s the pity, but if they did they’d see the contradictions of Conservatism in 2017. The party of capital is now pursuing a policy – hard Brexit – hated by capital. The political arm of the City is about to rip a hole through the City. All these paradoxes are given almost physical representation on our tellies every night by May herself – a populist who doesn’t actually like people.

As a non-believer in New Labour, Corbyn has no such ideological awkwardness, while John McDonnell is one of the few people in the Labour party who didn’t subcontract out their economic thinking to Brown and Ed Balls. But still, their team admit they have a way to go in rethinking Britain’s economy – and they are having to do so against a famously hostile parliamentary party. The result is Corbyn’s manifesto, which is chiefly remarkable for its unabashed defence of basic social democratic values. It’s the programme you imagine Brown would like to have delivered – if only he hadn’t been so busy triangulating.

But behind the scenes, the party is doing much deeper thinking. I have seen an internal Labour report commissioned by McDonnell. It forms one part of what could be a far more radical programme after Thursday night. Some of the lines in it will give the Daily Mail stories for days – such as calling for a overhaul of the BBC trust (which is “dominated by appointees from the corporate and financial sectors”) and hundreds of millions in public money to be spent on establishing workers co-ops. For the sympathetic reader, however, it contains some of the most imaginative thinking around economic democracy to come out of the party in decades (not saying much, sadly). In that, it sits alongside the speeches made by Corbyn’s team last week about the need for “industrial patriotism”, and to give public backing to new sectors.

All of this is miles away from exit polls and ballot counts in draughty school halls. But the bottom line is this: anyone who hoped 2016, the year of Trump and Brexit, was a one-off in political volatility is about to be mightily disappointed. What lies ahead is a long period of flux as both Labour and Tories grapple with what a post-crash Britain should do. It will be rough and bumpy – but necessary for their survival. Although it may not look that way from the studio sofas.