In 2011, Owen Jones solidified his reputation as one of Britain’s sharpest political commentators when he published Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. In the aftermath of the longest-serving Labour government in history, Jones asked how working-class people came to be vilified not just by elites but by representatives of the parties that supposedly existed to serve their interests. He followed this book up in 2014 with The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, a study of Britain’s powerful elite.

His most recent book, The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost, looks at the dangerous and hysterical politics that emerged after the 1990s, the period that came to be known as “the end of history.” For Jones, the decline of the West that conservative commentators obsess over is not driven by immigration or the permissive culture of liberalism but by the self-inflicted harms caused by decades of neoliberalism.

Jones, who joined the Labour Party at age fifteen but canceled his membership two years ago, spoke to Jacobin the day after the party’s conference. In this interview, he discusses the strength of the soft left during these early days of Andrew Burnham’s premiership, the origins of the right-wing panic about the decline of the West, and what kind of organizations socialists need to really build power.