Post-2008 protest mutated elite-mass management without shifting power.

Evidence

The long decade of protest that started after the 2008 credit crash can then be recast less as a successful assault on the Washington citadel from below than as a mutation in the methods of managing elite-mass relations. The solution to the 2008 crisis of massively overleveraged financial institutions—pumping the stock exchange and asset prices—further widened the gap between top and base across American politics, as it did between capital fractions. Yet it has not tilted the social gradient, and popular oversight over the apparatus of government remains weak. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 25

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core counterintuitive claim the reader wants — politicization without real change — and should connect to earlier chapters on postpolitics. — connects to: Post-politics gave way directly to hyper-politics without restoring mass organization — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 332; Leaderless decentralized protest allows cops to join freely — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 755