Theresa May has called a snap election. Front pages of the right-wing tabloids are looking forward to “Blue Murder.” They exhort May to “Crush the Saboteurs” as the Daily Mail squealed, in a gleeful nod to its Blackshirt past. This is the end, they fantasize, of metropolitan leftism, of Remain voters who won’t shut up, of political correctness, and above all of Jeremy Corbyn.

Unsurprisingly, many of Corbyn’s ostensible political colleagues agree, with relish. And how could they be wrong? Labour is polling at 25 percent of the vote, and the Conservatives have a twenty point lead. Allowing for all possible caveats — the unpredictability of British politics, the size and motivation of Corbyn’s base, polling bias — it is difficult to see how that will be reversed in seven weeks. And if it isn’t, Labour will be lucky to keep two hundred seats, let alone win the general election.

This is all completely accurate and, by common sense assumptions, it should result in the end for Jeremy Corbyn. But no statement of political reality, however accurate, is purely descriptive. Most of the time, neoliberal politics is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are told “there is no alternative” by the people who have the power to decide whether there is one: and so, usually, there isn’t. Likewise, statements about someone’s “electability” contain a performative element, in that they are usually trying to help create a consensus that they claim to be describing.