Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences traces the evolution of modern politics through four eras: mass politics, post-politics, antipolitics, and hyperpolitics.
The years 1914 to 1989 mark the age of mass politics, when politicisation was high and institutionalisation was also high – so people engaged with politics electorally and on the streets. They were joiners – of political parties, unions, congregations, working men’s clubs, reading groups; they participated in multiple interlacing institutions. Not by coincidence, this was also a time when political struggle resulted in concrete gains. Then, 1989 to the financial crash in 2008 (the years often called the “long 90s”) was the age of post-politics, when institutionalisation was low (we emphatically did not join clubs then, we went to clubs), and politicisation was through the floor. It was a time when technocrats took care of business while everyone else went to a rave, and we said history was over. From the crash through to about 2020 (sometimes earlier, this boundary is the most fluid) was the age of anti-politics – a resurgent Tea Party in the US, Beppe Grillo and anti-establishment protests in Italy, the Arab spring, the Occupy movement. Politicisation in this period came back with a vengeance, and even while institutionalisation hasn’t recovered, these movements still have institutional ambitions. Protest movements in Spain and Greece bore political parties, Podemos and Syriza; protest candidates in the US, France and the UK, had their eyes on retaking traditional parties from which the revolutionary intent had long been stripped away.
Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes, “the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.” As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s evocative phrase “bodies without organs”. Modern political movements, he writes, are “concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism”.
He found this pattern across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and he only stopped there, he says, because “I don’t have the linguistic and cultural reach to fully tell this story globally”. His descriptions are powerful. He writes of climate strikers and anti-lockdown demonstrators alike as “a myriad animated by brief, potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic influencers and digital demagogues”. And that, you have to admit, is exactly what it looks like.
Politics ordinarily affects the distribution or redistribution of wealth, directly or indirectly, as its ends or as a byproduct. “Follow the money,” as they say. Thus, the enormous shorting of airline stocks just before 9/11 was politics, just as South Carolina’s tax cut on Boomers’ boats is politics, and Florida’s tax cut on Boomers’ houses is politics. By this metric, one would expect “hyperpolitics” to be something like the seizure of innocent international Russians’ assets in the outbreak of the conflict in the Ukraine, or the mass seizure and liquidation of Americanized Nippon’s property during the Second World War. A media spectacle involving Halfricans somehow, or a different media spectacle involving a rabble of white people wandering the premises of the so-called “People’s House”, would not. Wake me up when “hyperpolitics” means the mass voiding of geriatric usury beneficiaries’ ill-gotten gains and the mass destruction of “Flock” cameras and the rest of the gynogerontocracy’s insidious implements of youth suppression and control.
Black Lives Matter may have been fleeting, but for the people who stole millions of dollars and bought multiple houses, the consequences were not fleeting.
These short-term movements could also be conceptualized as temporary astroturf fronts for permanent political machines.
*A media spectacle involving Halfricans somehow, or a different media spectacle involving a rabble of white people wandering the premises of the so-called “People’s House”, one would not.
James James:
Granted, the Great Halfrican Uprising Media Spectacle presumably was astroturfed with real money—to the extent that the banks’ circulating credits can be described either as “real” or as “money”—which must then have found its way into the pockets of real people.