Jeremy Corbyn has the professional politicians, journalists, and think-tankers who dominate conventional British politics bewildered. Ever since his stratospheric ascent during the Labour Party leadership campaign and subsequent triumph, he has upended all the rules of the twenty-first century neoliberal settlement in one of its heartlands — the Britain that gave the world Thatcherism, and later the template for Thatcherite governance by a social-democratic party, Tony Blair’s New Labour.

And it’s not just those within the Westminster bubble who have had their assumptions confounded by this development — the British left has as well. In recent years, the only parties of the European left showing any signs of life have been those outside, and to the left, of the classical labor movement, particularly Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos.

Doomed by their acceptance of austerity and struggling to reconcile their enduring attachment to the capitalist state with its diminishing ability to deliver meaningful social reform, the old parties offered studies in collapse (Greece’s Pasok), coalition with the Right (Germany’s Social Democratic Party), or futility (France’s Socialist Party).