Oxford theorist explains why modern protests yield no policy shifts
A new book by Oxford academic Anton Jäger argues that contemporary political movements have become intensely volatile but institutionally powerless, a dynamic that helps explain the chronic policy paralysis plaguing European economies.
As Andy Burnham arrived at 10 Downing Street this week, he noted the unsettling reality of being the sixth person in the last 10 years to make that walk. The remark captured a broader European anxiety about an electorate that swings wildly between enthusiasm and rage. That volatility is the subject of a new book by Oxford academic Anton Jäger that is being widely read by leftwing thinkers and Labour watchers.
Jäger, a 32-year-old lecturer in political theory, divides recent history into four eras to explain the present. From 1914 to 1989, mass politics prevailed: union membership, church attendance, and civic clubs were high, yielding concrete economic gains. "On the Flemish side, this meant that the Christian Democratic or the Catholic party was not just a party that said how you were to vote... It was a total doctrine," Jäger notes of his own family's history.
That institutional infrastructure was dismantled, a process Jäger places squarely on the union busting of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. People lost faith in organisations because the leverage of withdrawing labour was removed. "Unions were defanged and workers impoverished," he says.
The period from 1989 to the 2008 financial crash brought "post-politics," where technocrats managed economies while citizens disengaged. "Politics is no longer something that you see as affecting large-scale social change," Jäger says of this era. The 2008 crash then sparked "anti-politics"—movements like Spain's Podemos and Greece's Syriza—which remained highly politicized but still harbored institutional ambitions to take state power.
Today's era of hyperpolitics lacks even those ambitions. Jäger points to climate strikers and anti-lockdown demonstrators as "a myriad animated by brief, potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic influencers and digital demagogues." Modern movements are "concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism," unable to translate fleeting energy into lasting power.
For European businesses and investors, this framework clarifies a frustrating reality. Public life is now defined by constant, intense disruptions that ultimately
