Hype or Politics
You just created a million Club Chalamets
The most discussed book of the year, or at least so far, is Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear. The second most discussed book is JD Vance’s “I became a Catholic at forty because the most fascist friend of Jeffrey Epstein told me to so here’s why every Pope for the last sixty to two thousand years is a fake Catholic” tirade. The third most discussed, then, which also has the coolest cover, is Anton Jager’s Hyperpolitics. The book is, among other things, popular with Britain’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. The subtitle is “Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences”, which is more or less the premise of the book: why did movements like the Gillets Jaunes, Black Lives Matter, the Climate Strikes, et cetera, et cetera not accomplish anything?
Hype for Hyper
Two or three weeks ago, Spanish streamer “El Xokas” had a Burger King promotional campaign, including a limited edition burger, cancelled because he made fun of how little money a fan made. As the tweet above says, back in the twentieth century “the left” was based on mass mobilization of workers; today, it’s based on quote tweets. That is the essence of hyperpolitics. The book, like a lot of books these days, is based on a piece with the title “How the World Went from Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics“ in the Tribune from 2022, as well as a longer essay titled “Hyperpolitics in America”, which was published in the New Left Review in 2024 and for whatever reason it’s on PDF in Spanish. Unlike most of the books based on essays, this book is pretty good. The original essays work pretty well as an abridged version of the book if you’re too lazy and/or cheap to get it. I enjoyed the profile on Jäger in The Guardian, and also liked the reviews in the London Review of Books, the Cleveland Review of Books, Commonweal, and The New Republic.
The concept which gives the book its title comes from an essay by a friend of the blog, German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (more on him later), and is probably best summarized by the London Review of Books well, review of the book:
Politics in the late 2010s was fertile ground for heretics, political entrepreneurs and narcissists, but these characters lacked the aptitude, the patience and ultimately the power to get involved in the long, tedious work of policy innovation. Hyperpolitics, as Jäger writes, is ‘the product of a hard but hollow environment, an attempt to break the iron grip of neoliberalism without the requisite tools to do so’. His book concludes with the words of the Belgian photographer Tom Peeters, articulating what Jäger sees as the manic-depressive condition of politics today: ‘My generation constantly oscillates between the realisation that we need to get moving, preferably very quickly, and the feeling that all is in vain. The true challenge – to change things – appears nigh impossible.’ For Jäger, and for many who are involved in left-wing politics and activism, this sense that anything can be politicised, yet nothing can be changed, is a matter of deep disappointment and bewilderment.
Hyperpolitical life is, to put it shortly, a form of political engagement that contests everything and accomplishes nothing. A political event like the Reichstag fire being of serious consequence if it happened today is as imaginable as The Star Spangled Banner being replaced with We Are Charlie Kirk (which, to be fair, actually happened). Author Anton Jäger explains political activity across two dimensions: politicization, the interest of people in political activity and mobilization, and institutionalization, the participation in organized civic life.
The first dimension is the trickiest one to describe, so the book takes great pains to sample culture and media to show it: Annie Ernaux and Michel Houllebecq, Wolfgang Tillmans and Hugo Claus; Baudrillard and Fukuyama, all showed a world that was checked out of politics and checked in on their own personal enjoyment. The second dimension is a lot simpler: it’s the old fashioned “Bowling Alone” discussion of the decline of social capital and community participation. The main inspiration in thinking about this is the political scientist Robert Putnam, author of the famous Bowling Alone thesis: ever since the mid 1950s, participation in civic organizations declined in the United States, resulting in an atomized society and an atomized polity. Putnam’s theory is centered on social capital (the networks of relationships and trust that enable collective action) collapsed in the second half of the 20th century, such that people were doing things inside society rather than with it - the titular example, going to the bowling alley on your own, rather than as apart of a league.
The chronology of political life goes from the “high politics” of the 60s and 70s, when coal miners duked it out on the streets with the police and unions, synagogues, and churches bused their members to civil rights protests; to the postpolitics of the 1980s and 1990s, when people would rather do ecstasy in a nightclub than bother with the Rwandan Genocide - Jäger’s example comes from Annie Ernaux, whose The Years says “in the humdrum routine of personal existence, history did not matter”, and “As for defending rights, the only that came to mind were those of the consumer”. However, starting around 2008 (well, exactly in 2008), End of History “postpolitics” were replaced by antipolitics: SYRIZA and los indignados, Brexit and the Tea Party, Tahrir Square and Cinque Stelle; the uniting theme is what Argentines would call “que se vayan todos”, kick them all out, a rejection of establishment politics and parties in favor of the new and the disruptive. Houllebecq is the perfect avatar for this time: his books (at least according to the book, because I haven’t read anything by him) star lonely, dissaffected, alienated people lashing out in some crazy, violent way - for example, French farmers rioting en masse, blocking roads, and, finally, getting into shootouts with the police, two of which actually happened multiple times this decade.
For Jäger, there have been four states of politics in recent history: high mobilization and high institutionalization (the turbulent 60s and 70s, featuring frequent demonstrations by organized protesters, unions, and groups), low mobilization and high institutionalization (the “golden years” of the 1950s, with high civic capital and low political strife), low mobilization and low institutionalization (“the end of history”), and high mobilization with low institutionalization - hyperpolitics. The book’s (very cool) cover is, famously, a picture by Wolfgang Tillmans of two ravers; Tillmans captured the easygoing, feel-good, post-ideological vibe of the 1990s; however, by 2016, Tillmans was as politically engaged as they come, and was actively campaigning to stop Brexit. So, from the original essay:
The result is a curiously K-shaped recovery: while the erosion of American civic life proceeds apace, the country’s public sphere is increasingly subject to convulsive instances of agitation and controversy, from storming of government buildings to online conspiracy theories. General discontent runs high, fuelling political emotions; anger at police racism or Zionist violence—at immigrant crime or Chinese weather balloons—boils over.
Importantly, for Jäger, civil society decline is "equally disarticulated on both ends of the spectrum": churches and gun clubs have declined in the same way that unions have stopped providing muscle for the left. Jäger said in an interview with The Nation that “There is a long set of pre-political practices that previously provided a foundation for right-wing political activity that cannot be taken for granted anymore” - church attendance has collapsed, veteran’s organizations are not much of a force anymore, and gun associations have stopped mobilizing their membership. While both left wing and right wing parties lost their membership infrastructure in a similar way, the political consequences of that shared collapse are not symmetrical: they have different goals and different methods, so a society ruled by inertia and resignation is better for whoever tries to preserve the current state of things; again, from the same interview, “being the Party of Order (as Marx termed it) which seeks to stabilise or preserve a set of social relations rather than overhaul it", as well as a deeper pool of private donations that enables right wing organizations to operate aggressively without serving any real constituency (this, of course, was true for progressive politics for some time).
So, what happened? Here is where I think the book falters a little bit, or, more precisely, kinda dances around the topic like Lamine Yamal on one of his good days. The book very strongly describes hyperpolitics, and Jäger is very good at applying the concept and identifying its consequences (particularly to American politics, such as in this follow-up NLR article), but I think the book never really gets around to explaining its causes Why did social capital decline so much? Why did interest in politics decline and then increase?
One is the loneliest number
I think the first question is probably the simplest to answer: why was there such a strong decline in social capital starting in the middle of the 20th century? Let’s go back to Bowling Alone; in his book, Putnam distinguished two kinds of social capital, bonding (that tied groups within each other), and bridging (that tied them to each other). His big innovation was that the latter kind was the one that collapsed, and it was the one that made democratic participation possible. Jäger explains and describes how this worked in extreme detail, listing the profound ways in which unions, churches, sports clubs, party activities, cultural clubs, and the like shaped working class life in a variety of social contexts. His preferred explanation is material: unions were the backbone civic life in left-wing politics, and regulatory and structural changes made them go away.
I don’t see much of a problem with this explanation. Starting in the 1970s and especially after the 1990s, the labor market has increasingly split into two tracks over the last few decades: a high skill, high-education, “knowledge sector”, and a low-skill “manual sector”. This was due to changes in technology (particularly automation and the IT revolution), increased competition from China and other developing countries, the Great Recession recovery resulting in lower job creation and extreme competition for available positions (in the US, the “knowledge” track added 8.4 million jobs on net in the following decade, while the manual job track lost, on net, 5.5 million), and a series of other factors (loss of union density, cuts to the welfare state, etc). This meant that, while white collar jobs without a significant educational component (such as bank teller, or the original meaning of “computer) were lost, the service sector increase its demand for both low skill, “routine” labor and for high-skill, high human capital “knowledge” workers. In this sense, sociologist Theda Skocpol, in her 2003 book Diminished Democracy, proposes an interesting addition to the Bowling Alone thesis: the composition of the associations changed at the same time as associational life declined. After the Second World War, membership growth in large voluntary associations stalled, and importantly, educated elites who had participated in these cross-class organizations abandoned them. Associations tracing their roots all the way back to the 18th century like the Freemason showed a shift during this time from federated, cross-class membership groups to professionally staffed, donor-funded advocacy organizations run out of major cities and needing no local membership at all. The cause she gives for why the major cross-class organizations were replaced by white-collar NGOs is that the growth in numbers and economic heft of a professional-managerial class gave organizations new channels for influencing affairs (foundations, think tanks) that didn't require them to organize ordinary citizens at all.
Let’s take an example of a “peak political” incident: the heist for the trophy for the Coupe de France. The Coupe de France is one of the two main tournaments of the French “Ligue 1”, the first division football tournament1, and in August 9th 1979 the trophy was stolen from its display at the headquarters of FC Nantes by a group of four unemployed steel workers from Longwy as a publicity stunt. They put out a statement to the media saying “We have taken the Coupe de France. We are not thieves; we are workers in struggle defending our livelihood. If the Government gives us back our jobs, we will return the trophy.” The context, of course, was that the center right Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, had just announced a plan of economic reforms backed by the President, Valery Giscard d’Estaing (top 5 name of all time), which would have, in particular, shut down a series of industries and mining endeavors depending on the government, particularly in steel, and particularly in the Lorraine region in which Longwy is located. The steelworkers’ unions in the city were particularly active against the governent’s program, first with mass protests and violent riots, and later by the highly publicized (though basically random) stunt of stealing the country’s highest profile sports trophy and displaying it in the farmer’s market before returning it a few days later. In contrast, an example of a low-social capital heist is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum robbery in 1990 in Boston: a group of robbers entered the museum at gunpoint while dressed as police officers, subdued the guards, and vanished with a series of paintings, including Vermeer’s The Concert and Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The robbery was tracked to a series of either Irish or Italian outfits in the neighborhood of Dorchester; Dorchester was a manufacturing town in its own right before it was annexed in 1870, and has a strong industrial presence, particularly in confectionery (the Walter Baker chocolate factory), plus paper goods and a relatively minor shipbuilding sector. All of these sectors started declining after the 1950s, as well as declined after families left the city for the suburbs. The “low social capital” part is that the robbery was, of course, organized by the mob (which is kind of a union for places without many jobs), and rather than returning the works, it’s almost certain they were ruined when one of the suspects had a ditch in his false basement under his shed flood during a storm.
Putnam lists four main causes of declining social capital: generational change; television and the privatization of leisure (in his latter work this expanded to the internet and social media); suburban sprawl and car-centric urban planning; and work and time pressure, particularly in a two-income household. He concluded generational change accounts for roughly half the decline, television for around a quarter, sprawl for about a tenth, and time/money pressures for another tenth. I think it’s somewhat obvious that the first and last factors are the same thing (what Marx would call “social reproduction), and Putnam doesn’t offer a unifying causal story for why generations born after WWII invest less in civic life. Suburbanization doesn’t hold a lot of explanatory power in a narrative that varies throughout time and across different developed countries with major differences in urban practices. So we’re left with technology, and parenting.
I actually think Jäger makes a pretty smart point by basing his book on Sloterdijk’s essay In The Same Boat, which for some reason I cannot find in English online. Sloterdijk’s general idea is that humanity is like a raft in which we all live, emerging from the primal hordes of the early world which were, to a large extent, either literally or meataphorically seafaring. Because everyone in such a horde lived or died together, society as a unit could exist only as long as it understood itself as a unit; these hordes grew bigger and bigger (city, kingdom, nation-state) but remained bounded by this joint mythology. Sloterdijk’s key concept here is anthropotechnics; in the seafaring state, man is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, the wolf of man; anthropotechnics is the collection of social practices and institutions that turn man from a wolf into a dog (I’ve talked about it in last week’s post). In contrast, hyperpolitics is what happens when relevant political units extend beyond a natural fictional unit: particularly, globalization and the internet have now put all of mankind “in the same boat” whether they like it or not, but politics does not operate at this scale. Particularly, Sloterdijk notes, there has been a breakdown of the anthropotechnical process: the decline of humanism in education after World War Two led to a decline in the ability to create human beings capable of moral thinking rather than instrumental or subjective thought. So it is, kind of, what Robert Putnam was thinking, also for the reasons Jäger and Putnam note: structural economic changes and technology.
I don’t know if Anton Jäger is a Marxist or Marxian in any way, but he’s almost certainly a materialist, and the thing about his materialism in the book is that it leaves out the big character of 21st century politics: technology, and, in particular, the internet. Currently, India is being rocked by a series of large-scale protests by a movement calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, in reference to both India’s ruling party the Bharatiya Janata Party, and to a Supreme Court judge calling university students “cockroaches” and “parasites” for protesting over certain educational issues. Now, that it calls itself a party and has a manifesto making concrete demands, as well as organizing protests, might make you think that this is a 20th century style of engagement; instead it’s very much a 21st century, much like the Gen Z protests of 2025, the global protest surge of 2019, the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, and the protests of 2009-2012 (including Occupy Wall Street). The perfect book about this topic is Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci, which came out in 2017 and is available for free online.
In her book, Tufecki and was mostly trying to explain the emergence of massive, leaderless protests on social media, like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street in 2011. These movements follow pretty stable patterns: they’re able to mobilize extremely large groups of people without needing a lot of infrastructure or prior experience, which demonstrates the strength and support of the “movement”. Thus, the protesters are able to shape the public narrative, disrupt the regular order of politics and discourse, and thus influence politics and policy formally. However, this frequently means that the protests are unable of move beyond their initial tactics of achieve concrete outcomes due to the lack of leadership or a formal organization that can secure outcomes. One such example are the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest, which saw enormous turnout and persuaded people successfully both on a mass level and among elite constitutencies, but failed to really shift policy on race or policing very much over the following five years. Or, if you wanted to put it more succintly, the 2010s protest wave was characterized by extreme politicization without political consequences. Hyperpolitics discusses them in the “antipolitical” phase of politics: a constant state of agitation against everyone in general and nobody in particular, just a rejection of the current system.
Now, back to the obvious: the decline of socialization, dating, sex, and a variety of social and therefore civic behaviors has been, at this point, I think fairly well documented. There’s a pretty good chance it revolves around online life, particularly how these platforms are designed to be addictive: digital media uses a distinct psychological trick, flow, as laid out by Jay David Bolter’s The Digital Plenitude (a book from 2016 that has been inexplicably very trendy in Argentina for the last six months). The concept of flow, coined by psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (pronounced six cent mihaly) refers to a state of profound, prolonged focus. Flow can only be achieved with small, procedural tasks that have immediate payoffs with a clear cause-effect and cost-reward relationship. Compare The Mastermind, a very slow burn dramedy about an unemployed carpenter stealing three paintings from a municipal art museum, with scrolling TikTok: you pay attention for a little bit of time the whole time, if you don’t like a video you scroll down, and every video is optimized to make you watch it. Usually, this happens by inciting some instant emotional reaction - which happens to almost always be a negative emotion. This both means that people become less capable of relating to one another and, most importantly, that the “higher” forms of media (even the not particularly stimulating political television of the 90s and 2000s) gets replaced by lower and lower content. A recent addition to the literature of flow comes from columnist Derek Thompson’s Substack: citing researcher Shishi Wu, Thompson highlights passive flow in particular, which has three main features: “users engage without clear goals”, users “lose self-awareness (…) and disconnect with the world around them” and “don’t just spend more time than they intended on the site, but also they lose track of time entirely”.
Fundamentally, I think Jäger is making the right moves: he’s putting the onus on structural changes to the economy that dissolved the core of left wing political activity, labor unions, and linking it to the correct concepts; he doesn’t discuss Sloterdijk in those terms, but the decline of anthropotechnics and the rise of hyperpolitics does actually explain Putnam’s problems accounting for the decline in associational social norms. I just think his account of hyperpolitics suffers from not properly including the role of technology. Loneliness is at all time highs and political engagement also is; ironically enough, Jäger is the one person who understands this relationship, with his concept of “good civil society”, social organizations that steer people away from fascist politics, as opposed to “bad civil society” that builds an echo chamber for the most extreme members. This is similar to my take on teenagers and social media use: a lot of the commentary is driven by pundits assuming that teenagers using social media replaces their normal social life and social dynamics, but the reality is that it enhances it; most of the negative mental health effects were present in a version of Facebook that had no features besides showing you what other people were up to. In particular, social media in teenagers comes during a really sensitive time for them, it makes the stupid social dynamics of high school inescapable in a way they really weren’t before. There’s “good social media” and “bad social media”, where preexisting (good or bad) social dynamics get amplified or lessened - and this extends to adults, who in large part have started hanging out virtually instead of “IRL” with other people, which results in high quality socialization being replaced with low quality group chats and DMs; or with meaningful “bad” romantic experiences being replaced by at best dating apps and at worst nothing.
The king who brought back partying
With the choice of the cover image, Love (Hands in Hair), Jäger tries to portray a sort of carefree rejection of politics in favor of The End of History. However, this cultural turn away from politics is not some other thing coinciding with the End of History; it is the End of History. The term “The End of History” was coined by political philosopher Francis Fukuyama in a 1989 essay (and later book) on National Interest. Fukuyama was a disciple of Hegel through Alexandre Kojeve; Hegel’s view was that history was a process directed by reason (“Geist”) such that humanity would advance through stages of increasing logic and rationality until reaching the Most Logical system of understanding the world, liberal capitalist democracy. Fukuyama explains that liberal democracy succeeds because it’s the only system of government that can sustain thymos, man’s need for respect and recognition; drawing from Kojeve and Hegels’ concept of the master-slave dynamic: in society there’s masters (people with power) and slaves (people without it). The master wants to be recognized as inherently superior by the slaves, and the slaves want to be recognized as equal to the masters. Because neither side can give up their claim to recognition willingly, this produces enormous political tensions, which liberal democracy channels by making them focus on electoral and not physical domination, and by focusing them on elected political leaders who do great deeds on behalf of their followers (what Kojeve would call “the First Man”), or, for Fukuyama, by art and consumer spending.
The perfect example of this dynamic is Sex and the City, a world without politics and with, well, sex. The use Hyperpolitics has for Annie Ernaux is also interesting along these lines; Ernaux’s books are said to reflect these days, with people being disinterested in and disaffected by politics. However, I think he misses something very important about her work: in her 2022 Nobel Prize Lecture, Ernaux said: “Written in my diary sixty years ago. ‘I will write to avenge my people (…) I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth. That an individual victory could erase centuries of domination and poverty, an illusion that school had already fostered in me by dint of my academic success. How could my personal achievement have redeemed any of the humiliations and offences suffered? That’s not a question I ever asked myself. I had a few excuses.” Ernaux’s goal by writing autofiction, novels about her own life with a barely fictionalized gloss, was to avenge the historical injustices against her classes: the working class, belonging to a family of lower income shopkeepers in Yvetot, in Northern France; and women. The idea that she merely writes about womanly emotions, separate from any sort of social critique, is both misogynistic and wrong: to quote an internet friend of mine (excellent essay I highly recommend), there’s no “I’m just a girl” in Ernaux - her books are largely about class, about a girl and then a woman who lived in a society brutal to women and brutal to poor people and who became completely alienated from her parents to join France’s middle class cultural establishment. Her most famous book, L’Evenement, is about her getting a back-alley abortion as a university student; it’s written as her reminiscing about the experiences during the 1990s and features an explicit comparison between abortion bans and migration restrictions during the Balkans War.
I don’t really mean to say that Jäger is like, some kind of misogynist who hasn’t read Annie Ernaux; for once, her writing being autobiographical (well, autofictional) means that it does track the political changes Hyperpolitics describes and discusses. Ernaux’s earlier work largely takes place in the twilight days of the working-class world organized by mass-political categories; her work then moves into the liberationist left wing politics of the 1960s, and then to the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Her most famous book (and the one Jäger draws most from) is The Years (2008), tracks French society from the immediate postwar period through the 2000s, as well as tracking the dissolution of the world of mass political world into one ruled by privatized and consumer-mediated media. This is to say, she does portray a society that, by the nineties, was exhausted not with politics but with politicians - antipolitics and postpolitics.
What kind of society was that? The Years tracks a single person’s life from the 1940s through the 2000s, during which mass political movements (the postwar Communist and Socialist left, blue collar solidarity, the early days of French second wave feminism) thinned out into a consumerist, spectacle-obsessed brand of politics. Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (who would have turned 100 years old last year) describes such a dynamic in his book Liquid Modernity. Bauman argues that modern culture has shifted from the logic of collective action to the logic of indiviualized consumerism, and this is nowhere as visible as in politics. This comes as a result of structural change in the economy: under the “Fordist” paradigm of what he calls solid modernity, industry and the welfare state bound both labor and capital to specific locations and specific communal norms; in contrast, under liquid modernity, individuals become disembedded from their social context: identity is transformed into a consumer category, society stops supplying collective solutions to what are still, underneath, collectively produced problems (unemployment, instability, family decline), and capital and labor disentangle. Capital travels easily and quickly, developing an ability to stop anywhere and leave at any time, while labor remains fixed in place, but without any real solidarity or any stability.
In this sense, global elites became able to park their money, as well as their physical selves, in wherever is most convenient for them, leading to a political sphere more and more interested in catering to their interests. The End of History has, therefore, resulted in increasingly managerial and technocratic politics, where politics is about spectacle, marketing, and public relations. This drastically reduces accountability and turns politics into “brainrot”, a form of consumer-side engagement not with the serious matters of the state, but with another trinket or bauble on the TikTok store. Thus, in Bauman’s telling, politics is less an exercise in leadership and decisionmaking and more an exercise in managerial technocracy in the prose of governing, and in bland, focus-group driven marketing in the poetry of campaigning. Jäger seems to have a similar theory of political change, centered on Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void (which like Hyperpolitics,comes with a New Left Review essay and a review by the LRB).
Mair’s case is that political parties have completely fallen apart as units of political organization. Voting became more inconsistent and volatile; voters became more polarized; identification with parties by voters became weaker, and the identities of parties as entities were lost. To quote Mair in NLR, “…parties are failing as a result of a mutual withdrawal, whereby citizens retreat into private life or more specialized and often ad hoc forms of representation, while party leaderships retreat into institutions, drawing their terms of reference ever more readily from their roles as governors or public-office holders. The traditional world of party democracy—as a zone of engagement in which citizens interacted with their political leaders—is being evacuated.” For Mair, there was something of a puzzle: in the 1990s and 2000s, there was growing disinterest in politics, but growing (academic) interest in democracy; for him, the options were that either the former drove the latter (as in, to try and find a solution), or, more likely, that the latter drove the former, that the solution would be not “more” democracy but less, a democratic process that involves people less extensively and intensively, since an enormous amount of this research focused on procedural issues: de jure protections for “civil society”, constitutional safeguards and checks and balances, stable and predictable rules for judicial engagement. Mair’s view is that government “for, of, and by the people” involves more participation than putting a piece of paper in a box, and actually might require a lot of work; but, because organized political parties are the only way in which known forms of democracy can handle this amount of participation and retain an ability to govern, then the decline of political parties as units of political action and political belonging means major trouble for democracy.
The lack of attachment of voters to parties was paired with a rise in the intensity of media coverage of political scandals and political conflict, which gave the media an enormous amount of power to set the political agenda and an enormous sway over electoral outcomes; a recent study finds that the entertainment value of such coverage is a big driver of partisan polarization in the United States. To quote Mair again, “Whether the increasing disengagement of voters is responsible for the emergence of this new mode of politics, or whether it is an emerging form of politics that is encouraging voter withdrawal is, at least for now, a moot point. What is beyond dispute is that each feeds the other. As citizens exit the national political arena, they inevitably weaken the major actors who survive there—the parties. And this, in turn, is part of, and promotes, audience democracy, or, in another formulation, ‘video politics’; for these grow stronger when parties are weak. Strong parties are difficult to sustain when politics turns into a spectator sport.” The most important concern, which he elaborates on to some extent, is that “party leaders look beyond their shrinking membership to the electorate at large”; parties simply lose all interest in representing anyone or anything, and lose their distinctive policies, ideas, and beliefs - in large part, accompanying the decline of other civic groups, such as trade unions, churches, business associations, mutual societies, and social clubs. This meant that political parties would become increasingly embedded into the political system through procedural reforms, but also increasingly dettached from society by representing a shadowy entelechy known as “The People” without engaging or activating it; members and affiliates transformed from the ones driving the car to the ones servicing it, as donors and internal reforms have taken over. This has also meant that parties see their responsibility not as representing their members, but as “governing”, whatever that means, which puts the work of “opposition” squarely on non-party political actors, since the parties have a task of governing; this also curtails the policies they think they can even think to offer, since it would be “irresponsible” to ignore the financial markets and develop a reputation for the next go at government in four to eight years. For Mair, this would become increasingly repetitive: ”As political and party competition are hollowed out even further, they offer even more encouragement to the politics of the spectacle and the horse-race. And this becomes more likely to produce the sort of candidates and elected politicians whose qualities, following Schumpeter, are even less likely to be those of the good administrator.”
In essence, what you have here is a global weakening of the relationship between labor and capital because of capital's power to dissolve social and communal bonds. This creates growing instability in all human relationships (marriage, identity, geography, and career), which in turn makes it impossible for political actors like unions and civic associations to retake the power they once had. That power just doesn’t exist anymore. A union can’t win concessions from a factory owner, or from the French government by stealing a football trophy, if the factory can just leave its location at any time. At the same time as globalization and capital mobility hollowed out blue-collar manufacturing, the rise of a credentialed white-collar workforce led to a different type of political organization emerged, one that didn’t need voters or mass membership, and developed a theory of democracy to explain itself without it. Under the same enormous pressure of globalization as individual communities, national leaders conceded an enormous amount of power to technocratic institutions and expert networks, in effect creating democracies without voters, or politics.
But the main problem is that politicians, by definition, are very active people. It’s very obvious, at least considering the popularity of antipolitics during the entirety of the post-political period (antipolitics, much like “populism” and “patriotism”, is basically a marketing term), that political leadership is a desirable quality. Andy Burnham, not to go very far, is treated as some kind of Michael Jordan caliber phenom for having the ability to say things like “we should invest in schools because children are the future”, the kind of conviction or, frankly, competence lacking from everyone since David Cameron. And where does this lead us besides back to Peter Sloterdijk: in In The Same Boat, Sloterdijk uses the concept of “megalopathia”, the suffering from wrestling with great questions. First introduced by him in a a 2005 lecture at the Tate Gallery on art, politics, and terror, Sloterdijk uses it as somewhat analogous to Aristotle’s megalopsychia, the greatness of the soul: for the German, the key to political leadership is being able to sit with enormous questions that acknowledge the scale, and unity, of society as a whole.
The key here, and so far I think I’m the only one making this connection in this context, is that the concept of anthropotechnics also has to apply to megalopathia: politicians need to be able to be trained into having this sort of character and mentality by an especially developed educational site capable of producing disciplined exposure to big, difficult questions over time. Fortunately for all of us, such an institution exists: elite universities such as the American Ivy League, Britain’s Oxrbidge circuit, and the French grandes écoles. Unfortunately for all of us, they are, by and large, completely falling apart: the American Ivies have been beset by all manner of criticism over the last decade (if we’re being honest, too much criticism), but the most relevant one is simply the stark decline of academic quality: rampant academic fraud, grade inflation, admissions cheating, and, most recently, an excessive reliance on artificial intelligence. Robert Putnam noted that families don’t really participate in the intergenerational transmission of social or cultural capital anymore; politics, as we’ve noted, is increasingly produced by a small set of elites, who have to be especially trained to be elites by educational institutions - well, those institutions aren’t doing their job. Nobody is at the wheel anymore - on Motomami, one of the song says “I drive, God leads me” (“Yo manejo, Dios me guía”); for the professional managerial class, God is on the driver’s seat too. The obvious problem here is that, well, if mass political activity of the kind seen during the Golden Years of Capitalism (and before too) isn’t structurally possible anymore, and elite technocratic politics is a complete cognitive dead end, then who’s driving the car?
Jäger, and most people discussing left wing organizing seriously, cite the work of political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as being one of the drivers of the shift from post politics to antipolitics. For Laclau and Mouffe, radical (left-wing) populism required building cross-class alliances rather than relying on a traditional working-class base, since politics isn’t the expression of a pre-existing sociological group but rather the construction of “the people” as a discursive alliance, unified against an antagonistic “them”. The perfect example is the Greek political party Syriza, which came into power in 2015 on an “us versus the troika” (the IMF, ECB, and European Commission), especially given how Yanis Varoufakis, a charismatic heterodox economist, was its finance minister. Varoufakis proposed a referendum to reject the troika’s austerity recommendations, saying he would resign if the referendum failed; when the referendum succeeeded, he… resigned anyways and Syriza did whatever the troika asked them to do. The Laclau/Mouffe strategy was, indeed, able to win an election through discourse, but it couldn’t durably restructure power precisely because the underlying human capital just didn’t exist anymore.
From bowling alone to dancing on my own
What’s left for, well, the left? Simone Cromer is a 60 year old Black woman; she was born in Detroit, got a psychology degree in the University of Michigan, and currently works in healthcare in Los Angeles. In 2024, her home burned down in the Eaton Fire. She is, according to her detractors, a strong supporter of Israel. According to herself, she almost took a job in the World Trade Center in September 2001, but had some sort of premonition that it would be a bad idea (I had a similar one about spending a few months studying in Spain in late 2019, for… the first half of 2020). The reason she’s relevant is none of those things: instead, it’s her online presence: Cromer has around 49,200 followers on the website formerly known as Twitter in her account; in particular, Simone Cromer is the poster formerly known as Club Chalamet.
Why does it matter that a sixty year old woman got beat up by a nonbinary lesbian over being the wrong kind of fan for a Heated Rivalry actor? Well, isn’t it hyperpolitics, in its own way? A leaderless internet mob showed up with no negotiated program and converted that energy into a single stupid skirmish that didn’t change anything and just riled people up online. In his 2025 book El Archipiélago (I’ll let you figure out that translation on your own), Argentine novelist Roberto Chuit Roganovich proposes a new alternative to mass politics: taking over the culture. Roganovich argues that the new right won a decades-long head start by recognizing three interlocking crises before the left did: a "crisis of subjectivity" fairly similar to the pitfalls of identity in the age of liquid modernity; a “crisis of imagination” built around the lack of a grand left wing narrative in the End of History, and a capture of “the passions”, like indignation and resentment, which one fueled the left. The central image of the book is, well, the title, the archipelago: the social fabric became a sea of scattered, isolated islands, replacing the old parties’ capacity to aggregate different people and groups.
This is all pretty, I would say, uncontroversial. “The archipelago” is just Bowling Alone. The crisis of subjectivity is just the End of History and liquid modernity: people feel like their lives don’t give them access to any form of recognition besides consumerism and work, and feel alienated from most community organizations (which, by and large, don’t really exist). The crisis of imagination is something I say pretty regularly, that there’s just a complete lack of political imagination in liberal spaces anymore, and that without any real ideas about how to resolve ongoing problems the ideology is just going to disappear from relevance; it’s also the entire content of Peter Mair’s book. And the last part is pretty politically contingent: who can best capitalize on mass public anger and indignation seems to change over time.
The book does actually propose solutions, the metaphor for which is Pangea (the ancient supercontinent that united the entire landmass of Earth), is built around three “returns”: a return to owning the internet commons collectively as a material thing; reclaiming cognitive sovereignty by rehabbing absolutely dismal attention spans and rebuilding “third spaces” like unions, clubs, libraries, and churches; and rebuilding the figure of public intellectuals (a much bigger deal in traditional Argentine mass culture than American) by embedding political content inside apolitical hobby communities like video games, fitness, sports, fanfiction, and fandoms. The interesting part is that he doesn’t really say the left should reject hyperpolitics (which was, in all honesty, a disaster), but rather that, because they’re here to stay, activists and politicians should just learn how to play the game and take it over.
There’s an interesting chronology here: most people (not Jäger, notably) think the definining incident of contemporary right wing politics is Gamergate: in 2014 some boring game nobody cared about got a bad review by an online magazine and the developer’s ex boyfriend accused her of sleeping with a journalist at that magazine to get the good review. It very quickly snowballed into a gigantic controversy over “ethics in video game journalism”, feminism, and whether video game developers were catering to women over their real fans, and this noble cause was advocated for by sending death threats to people who thought the whole thing was dumb and crazy. It also brought together a series of vaguely right wing internet communities that formed what then became the New Right and is now just The Right. The Gamergate movement was completely ineffective: it failed at its only real goal because it was disorganized, short on ideas, and overall lacking any sort of vision or theory of change. However, most retrospectives agree that Gamergate was influential because it produced a durable online playbook (memes, coordinated harassment, amplification tactics) that has been adapted across later political and cultural fights, such as the recent controversy over Cracker Barrel (a restaurant for old White people) changing its logo and aesthetic. This leads to a much clearer problem with the idea of weaponizing hyperpolitics for left wing purposes: it doesn’t work. The Cracker Barrel incident is most notable today because it completely derailed the campaign to make Charlie Kirk a global right wing martyr: the whole thing happened two weeks after he got shot by a leftist and all of the people trying to make hay off of it decided that it was more important to put an ugly cartoon barrel back on a bankrupt chain restaurant’s billboards. There’s also the fact that Wokeness, as a political phenomenon, entirely consisted of hyperpolitics taking the driver’s seat of the left, and most people (including me) argue that it left basically nothing behind besides some old McDonald’s posts about supporting Black trans women.
In his interview for The Nation, Jäger explicitly cites Zohran Mamdani as a positive example: I think he’s right, but maybe not in the way he meant at the time. Socialism is having something of a moment in the United States: the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, captured the New York Mayor’s office (in fact, both Mamdani and primary third place finisher Brad Lander are members), won the Washington, DC mayor’s primary, took the Seattle mayor’s office, and is about to win the Los Angeles mayoral election as well. The organization also saw significant successes in a number of primary elections for Congress, such as unseating multiple members of Congress in New York, and currently as of today socialists lead the primaries for Wisconsin governor and Michigan Senate. The Maine Senate nomination went to a guy the DSA supported, and when he dropped out after allegations of sexual assault, he was replaced by another DSA supported candidate. DSA membership has skyrocketed, and at 126,000 people, makes it one of the, if not the single, largest explicitly socialist organization on the planet. In contrast, in 2016 they had 5,000 members, and peaked at 80,000 or so by 2021 before declining to 50,000 by late 2024. What’s behind this move towards a harder stance in the American left? In a recent interview by the Niskanen Center, political scientist Matt Grossman comments that “There’s been a collapse in trust and support for the Democratic establishment, and really anybody who’s tied to incumbency”, and sociologist David Purucker adds that “that’s the real story I think of the Democratic Tea Party. It’s not DSA per se. It’s this broad radicalization among what we can call Normie Democrats. And the Democratic establishment should be, I think, very worried about that.”. In short, people are furious at the way the establishment is reacting to Donald Trump (starting with losing a second presidential election to him), and are looking for a group that can take a stance against that.
There’s a second, more interesting angle: the “partyism” debate of 2024 and 2025, where various people argued that rather than focusing on tweaks to their messaging, the Democrats needed to become an actual political party with an actual physical presence in communities. Well, the DSA does that: at a recent profile of attendees at the national meeting, the New York Times caught the following gem: “Cliff Connolly, a national leader from Orlando, said the DSA fills the same social function for him that the Catholic Church played for his parents when they were in their 30s”. This is, of course, a comparison Jäger makes himself, quoting writing by Didier Eribon about how the Communist Party was like Church for his own parents in the 1950s. Theda Skopcol wrote about the success of the Tea Party, a conservative movement in the US in the early 2010s that took over the Republican Party, in her book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism: by conducting extensive fieldwork with local chapters of the group, she found a very successful civic organization holding regular meetings with real local leadership, as well as well-funded national organizations and infrastructure that leveraged that genuine grassroots energy toward pre-existing elite goals like tax cuts and deregulation. The term “the Democratic Tea Party” has been used a lot, and it seems the DSA are the ones who stand to benefit - they have the infrastructure and, honestly, they have a physical meeting room. It seems that is enough to defeat the billion dollar AIPAC janissary war chest.
Conclusion
I think Hyperpolitics is a book worth reading; it’s generally pretty insightful and descriptively accurate about the phenomena it studies. I also think his understanding that there’s no going back to the 1950s is correct, even if he does seem to underplay the importance of social media (and ownership of it) to some degree. Overall I think you people can tell I generally agree with him on the phenomena he’s describing and just wanted to talk about my own ideas for the why. The implications are, I think, pretty major: “populism” and “uniting the people against the elites” doesn’t work, and making it 1965 again through any means possible won’t work either. So what does work? Harnessing hyperpolitics doesn’t. Perhaps “showing up in physical places at the right time and place” would - as long as that doesn’t get captured by nonsense.
The main shift is also that not only has the structure of politics changed, but so has the content. The premise of In the Same Boat, the essay that launched a million Jäger essays, is that globalization and global integration (including, importantly, cultural integration) has resulted in a different substance of politics, one where the major political questions happen at a scale completely beyond national politics. Everyone has been forced into the same global boat by problems that don't respect any borders. Ironically, the best term for these objects come from a completely unrelated book, Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (which, to my knowledge, nobody has ever connected with Hyperpolitics, besides some random people on Instagram hashtags). Morton’s book defines a hyperobject as a worldly phenomenon distributed in time and space relative to humans, at such a large scale that it is never fully accessible or conceivable in its entirety. To him, these have five properties: viscosity (they stick to everything, such that they are impossible to ignore); nonlocality (they’re everywhere but also nowhere - you never see them, just their local implications); a sort of permanence across time; and then two more that are just nonlocality slightly restated - hyperobjects are only seen partially through lower dimensional manifestations and only indirectly via their effects on and interactions with objects. The perfect example is something like climate change: a massive global phenomenon occurring in such a gigantic scale that people can’t really apprehend it directly. There was a recent viral TikTok of a group of friends out to lunch, saying “whoever brings up Israel, Trump, or AI first has to pay”; that is a hyperobject: a global problem of genuinely unmanageable scale for a single person.
I think this produces two problems. The first is the obvious: that even with a serious political class and a serious political process this wouldn’t be enough, which was Sloterdijk’s entire point; with stupid idiots in charge and no politics to speak of, we’re getting into fun territory. The second problem is more of a question: when confronting horrors of such an unimaginable magnitude, why isn’t totalizing hysteria a serious answer? COVID, racism, genocide, and AI provoke such intense emotions precisely because they are so widespread and observable but also so large to be intractable to most people. The problem with the movie Eddington, which tries to mock liberals and conservatives in 2020, is that it simply never takes them seriously: “whether you get to go outside” or “is the police going to murder you for your race” is portrayed as a silly distraction compared to data centers. Jäger's "extreme politicization without political consequences" is exactly what politics looks like when publics are reacting, with genuine, rational urgency, to gargantuan problems using institutions and mechanisms designed to only process bounded, local-scale, discrete-culprit conflicts in social conditions that haven’t existed for three generations.
Recently, a large number of migrants (around 80,000) crossed the border of Spain’s fortified enclave in Ceuta from Morocco; the Spanish response was to accuse Morocco, and by extension the US and Israel, of sending them to destabilize Spanish politics. The European response, meanwhile, was to… blame Spain and shut down the Schengen Zone to the Iberian country, an actual first. If the presence of a small “horde”, to borrow from Sloterdijk, can so thoroughly destabilize an entire continent, then what can come from a genuinely worldwide disruption? What is going to happen if AI actually bites into the white collar workforce en masse? What are countries going to do when historic heatwaves batter the world and millions of people try to move out of places that are not livable anymore? When asked about technology in his final interview, published after he died in 1976, German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously said “Only God can save us”; perhaps he saw what was coming better than all of us.
I already explained this in my World Cup post but most countries have two main tournaments: the national league, which pits every team against every other team, and a national cup, where they qualify for playoffs based on the national league; winning both is known as the double, and winning both plus a continental cup (the Champions’ or Europa league in Europe and the Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana in Latin America) is the treble. There’s also, sometimes, a national and a regional supercup (which pits the top teams against each other), as well as a club world cup (self explanatory). Winning all six is known as the sextuple and only four teams have ever done it (Barcelona in 2009, Bayern Munich in 2020, Paris Saint-Germain in 2025, and Arsenal in 2007 for the women’s leagues). It does get complicated because some countries have a different third championship outside of the supercup, each country has their own criteria for the cup and supercup, and some countries (most notably Argentina, with a league, two national cups, and three distinct supercups) just have a lot more tournaments in general.
Great piece. Ty for writing.