Hyperpolitics

1. A Grin Without a Face

• Evolution of politics:
  • 1914-1989 - Mass Politics (High Politicization / High Institutionalization) - Citizens engaged in politics through highly structured, collective bodies like mass political parties, robust trade unions, and deeply rooted community or religious organizations.
  • 1989-2008 - Postpolitics (Low Politicization / Low Institutionalization) - Elites decamped into sealed-off, technocratic institutions, and civil society began to hollow out. The broader populace became largely apathetic, treating politics as an administrative matter for experts rather than a battleground for ideas.
  • 2008-2020 - Antipolitics (Rising Politicization / Declining Institutionalization) - After the 2008 financial crash, populism and horizontal protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Syriza, and Podemos) attempted to translate raw anger into new institutional alternatives or capture existing parties (like Corbynism), but faced severe structural limitations in building durable, long-term power.
  • 2020s - Hyperpolitics (High Politicization / Zero Institutionalization) - Public life is completely saturated with moral urgency, culture wars, and intense digital outrage, yet the civic infrastructure to anchor it has completely vanished. An eminently market-friendly types of politics, in form as well as content.
• Sloterdijk:
  • "When Western men and women style themselves as 'democrats' today, they do not do so out of any pretense of contributing to the public good, but because they rightly regard democracy as the type of society that allows them not to think about the state and the art of belonging together."
  • "The single-occupancy apartment is the vanishing point of civilization, and living along the crowning achievement of a millennia-long process of anthropological refinement."

2. Putnam from the Left

• Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000) - about the collapse in civic engagement
• In his guesstimates, the decline in civic activity was due to:
  • 10% - Time pressure and changing work patterns
  • 10% - Suburbanization
  • 25% - Electronic entertainment media, especially TV
  • 50% - Generational change - younger cohorts were simply less engage than their parents and grandparents
• During the period of mass politics, the very way of thinking about oneself, the values one espoused, the attitudes one adopted were all to a large extent shaped by the conception of the world that the 'Party' helped to inculcate in people's minds and to diffuse throughout the social body.
• By contrast, ideological disorientation is a hallmark of the hyperpolitical age. Debate erupts over one issue today, another tomorrow. But individuals no longer possess a heuristic capable of unifying and imposing coherence on their various viewpoints. What emerges instead are fleeting, episodic partis pris.
• Skocpol: NGOs are "advocates without members" - lawyers speaking on behalf of defendants who, for the most part, would remain mute and passive. Together with PR consultants and technocrats, they made up the ghost armies of postpolitics.
• In the face of the claims of business groups, labor unions, and the beneficiaries of governmental largesse, it becomes difficult if not impossible for democratic governments to curtail spending, increase taxes, and control prices and wages. In this sense, inflation is the economic disease of democracies.
• Winant: "Whiteness itself is a kind of inchoate associational gel, out of which a variety of more specific associations may grow in a given historical conjuncture."
• The right has historically been content to defend existing property relations. Apathy and resignation are its greatest assets, not militancy. It thus remains unclear whether social capital is actually growing on the right or whether it is simply eroding more slowly.
• Heideman: The taming of labor removed the external constraints that once disciplined capitalists and motivated them to maintain unity and pursue a common agenda. Without a worthy adversary to concentrate the mind, internal fractures are likely to widen - between "woke" capital and the Koch brothers, DeSantis and Disneyland, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon - and the contemporary state can no longer fulfill its role as guarantor of Gesamtkapitalist.

3. The Antipolitical Decade

• The progressive-neoliberal consensus of the long 1990s released its hegemonic grip; left and right-wing movements destabilized the established party systems, a process that eventually culminated in the populist victories of 2016 and beyond.
• Populism: Across the globe, political entrepreneurs and parties claiming to speak in the name of the people (against elites) won majorities, unseated incumbents, and attacked the independence of the judiciary.
• Saint Victor: "Twenty years of politics as spectacle, mockery and technocratic excesses have produced an aggrieved populace who, whether hyperactive or apathetic, out of protest or sheer disgust, are turning above all against their elites... whom they accuse of having betrayed and abandoned them."
• Zizek: "We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?"
• In a sense, one might say that it was the success of right-wing antipolitics that gave birth to hyperpolitics.
• If antipolitics was initiated by social groups hit hard by the crisis of 2008, now the entirety of the public sphere is politicized. By the same token, while populism attached itself to a recognizable ideological vector, hyperpolitics is a permanently volatile, diffuse phenomenon. Whereas populist parties at least made the first steps towards reinstitutionalization, "hyperpolitical" refers to a general atmosphere rather than to specific actors. In this respect, hyperpolitics represents a redoubling of antipolitics, a mode of viral panic typical of the internet age with its short cycles of hype and outrage.
• Hyperpolitics burst forth periodically only to recede, less a corrective to postpolitics than yet another manifestation.

4. Escape Routes

• Baudrillard: "Instead of seeking fresh perspectives, history appears rather to be splintering into scattered fragments, and phases of events and conflicts we had thought long gone are being reactivated."
• Anyone can join a Telegram channel or be invited to a group chat; the price of membership is low, the costs of exit even lower. Leaders can, of course, try to choreograph these broods - with social media posts of their own, television appearances, or anti-disinformation campaigns. But such choreography is not substitute for durable organization.
• The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 629 prison inmates per 100k inhabitants; in Russia, the figure in September 2022 was 324, in Germany just 67. In total, over 2m people are incarcerated in American prisons - a figure surpassed only by the Soviet Union under Stalin. Historians have long argued that there is a close connection between the underdevelopment of the American welfare state and the overdevelopment of its carceral counterpart.
• In earlier times, individuals were embedded in dense social networks and participated in a wide array of intermediate associations. Today's societies are composed of increasingly atomized and isolated individuals. As long as history moves along smoothly and predictably, this need no necessarily be a problem. But when societies enter choppier waters, atomization amplifies their volatility - and the collective incapacity to respond to today's political and ecological crises.
• Blühdorn: Westerners emancipated themselves twice: first from traditional authorities, then from the kind of political commitment required to accomplish that emancipation. Who could command them to reverse course?
• Most episodes of inflation in the 20th C resulted at least in part from collective wage demands. Inflation was therefore not merely a technical datum but an index of history; the moment that a factor of production, labor, became a political actor with a claim to its share of the collectively generated surplus. It was precisely this metamorphosis that neoliberalism set out to reverse.
• Hobsbawm: "Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation. Unlike sex, which is essentially individual, it is by its nature collective and unlike the sexual climax, at any rate for men, it can be prolonged for hours. On the other hand, like sex it implies some physical action - marching chanting slogans, singing - through which the merger of the individual in the mas, which is the essence of the collective experience, finds expression."
• The bases of Hobsbawm's communism:
  • This sense of mass ecstasy,
  • Pity for the exploited,
  • The aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system, "dialectical materialism",
  • A little bit of the Blakeian vision of the new Jerusalem
  • A good deal of intellectual anti-philistinism.
• Before the dawn of modernity, societies were perhaps so totally institutionalized - through feudal structures, religion, tradition, guild regulations, and so on - that there was no space for political agency in the modern sense.
• What is distinct about melancholy, Sigmund Freud observed, is its "tendency to turn into the symptomatically opposite state of mania", a "cyclical insanity" that leaves the patient prone to "the regular alternation of melancholic and manic phases", struggling in both cases to repair the loss of the libidinal object."
• Peeters: "My generation constantly oscillates between the realization 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."