Social-democratic mass politics were a contingent product of specific social conditions.

Evidence

Without a reinstitutionalization of political engagement, the left will remain hostage to impotent volatility, and its adversaries will continue to enjoy a decisive advantage. At the same time, the present is worlds away from the institutional landscape of the interwar period or the organized capitalism of the post-1945 era. Today’s impasse can hardly be undone by a voluntaristic act of will, simply because a young Belgian historian exhorts citizens to join a local party branch or take out a union card. This raises the question of whether the mass-political dynamism of what is in retrospect an idealized golden age of social democracy was not in fact a contingent product of specific social conditions. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 253

Categorization

• XREF: Underscores the reader’s stated study of whether the golden-age social-democratic order rests on contingent conditions, echoing Putnam’s bowling-alone theme from the left. — connects to: Universal suffrage in capitalist states inevitably produces social-democratic majorities — Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise…, 102; Democratic regimes are rare, contingent, recent historical creations. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 180
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization…, 253