We’ve Got a Bad Case of ‘Hyperpolitics’

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences
Anton Jäger
Verso (2026)

Many of us in North America and Europe have been baffled by the rise of leaders like Donald Trump, who seem to break laws with impunity while flouting the conventional wisdom about political success.

Trump and other right-wing populist leaders do and say things that would once have ended political careers on the spot. But now they go on and on, invulnerable.

Belgian historian Anton Jäger, currently a lecturer in politics and international relations at University College, Oxford, offers some explanations that make a kind of sense in his latest book. But he doesn’t offer a way out of our present problems.

‘Mass politics’ got us here

In Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences, Jäger argues that for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, “mass politics” produced both democracies and autocracies.

In mass politics, political parties proposed detailed programs and enrolled huge memberships who expected those programs to be carried out when their parties gained power.

In Jäger’s terms, mass politics was characterized by “high institutionalization” and “high politicization.” The parties were themselves institutions of civil society, offering sports, education, arts and other social programs as well as policy platforms. With high politicization, everything was political, from chess clubs to movies and plays.

Mass politics enabled totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; it also enabled democracies like Canada and the U.S.

During the late 1980s, Jäger tells us, mass politics began to fade. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and its allies found themselves victorious but adrift, trying to find reasons to sustain policies and institutions now obsolete.

‘Post-politics’ and the retreat from public life

The 1990s and early 2000s were the age of “post-politics,” when, Jäger writes, “journalistic brouhaha over sex scandal and election fraud papered over the growing retreat from public life initiated by the American populace.”

“Workplace and community associations were dissolving in the acid of deindustrialization and triumphant market logic,” Jäger writes.

“Always an instantiation of imperfect party competition, the American duopoly [of Democrats and Republicans] was becoming an effective example of non-competition; the semi-sovereign people, as political scientist Elmer Schattschneider had once termed them, were increasingly non-sovereign. In conditions of convergence, culture wars alone offered a simulacrum of rivalry.”

This situation was a triumph of free-market globalism, also known as neoliberalism. American political institutions, especially unions, were moribund.

Political parties themselves lost most of their grassroots infrastructure, transforming themselves into what Jäger calls “cartels,” concerned with preserving their bases while hoping to gain enough independent voters to win the next election. Post-politics was a time of low politicization and low institutionalization.

A recession-era shakeup

Post-politics ended in 2008, Jäger argues, with the global financial crisis. He credits the French legal historian Jacques de Saint Victor with coining the term “antipolitics” in 2014 to describe “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.”

Antipolitics expressed itself as a wave of protests against the political institutions that survived the 2008 financial crisis. They ranged from Occupy Wall Street to #MeToo to the Arab Spring — and all failed to achieve any real political change. This was high politicization operating with no institutional means to carry out such change.

While he describes European antipolitics as similar to the American version, Jäger focuses on the U.S. under Trump’s first administration.

Surprisingly, he rejects the common label of fascism for the Trump regime, arguing that fascism was the bourgeoisie’s response a century ago to a working class that posed a credible threat of revolution. No such threat exists today, for all Trump’s recent warnings about “communism.”

Instead, Jäger argues, Trump is an echo of Bonapartism, established by Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte in 1852 when, as president of the French Second Republic, he overthrew his own government and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. Ignoring his people’s wishes, he ruled as an authoritarian until the Prussians captured and dethroned him in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

It’s an interesting distinction, but future historians will likely stick with “fascism” or simply “Trumpism” to describe the ideology of Trump’s rule.

In any case, Trump benefited from the transition from “antipolitics” to “hyperpolitics,” as did European right-wing leaders like Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán.

‘Hype and outrage’ related to a ‘crisis of attention’

Hyperpolitics, Jäger tells us, “represents a redoubling of antipolitics, a mode of viral panic typical of the internet age with its short cycles of hype and outrage.”

Like antipolitics, it includes “a demobilization and critical weakening of civil society, the hollowing out of parties, the increasing insulation of the state from popular pressure.”

But hyperpolitics, he explains, involves “incessant but uncoordinated excitation. Emotionally it is related to the crisis of attention characteristic of the age of the smartphone.”

If hyperpolitics is about being always upset about everything, some new shock will soon displace the last one.

We experience these shocks not as groups sharing common values, but as individuals obsessively doomscrolling through the day’s bad news.

Social media enables hyperpolitics, but it is no substitute for political gatherings and protests organized by institutions like trade unions and advocacy groups.

Everything is political, but nothing changes

In a hyperpolitical atmosphere, mass protests can be enormous yet ineffectual. Everything is politicized, from gender issues to science and history, but nothing changes. Movements on the right and left, whether Stop the Steal or Black Lives Matter, arise as hashtags and vanish for lack of institutions that can act on them. The right wing seems to be happier with this situation than the left, perhaps because the right can at least demolish institutions.

As Jäger writes, “BLM protesters, climate strikers, anti-lockdown protesters resemble less a militant collective than... swarms, a myriad animated by brief, potent stimuli, stirred to action by charismatic influencers and digital demagogues.”

He defines hyperpolitics as “an attempt to break the iron grip of neoliberalism without the requisite tools to do so.”

The only way out is through

Is there a way out of hyperpolitics into a functional politics? Jäger thinks it will take a transformation of the United States, and by implication other countries: “If the situation is to be fundamentally altered … what is required is the construction of a mature welfare state and its concomitant set of social rights, and the first step in that direction is to force the ruling elites to accept a redistribution of resources.”

But such a welfare state may be impossible, because the conditions that once made left-wing mass politics a formidable force no longer exist. Jäger isn’t sure those conditions can be renewed, but if they can’t, we must remain in a kind of bipolar politics, swinging between despair and mania.

Jäger offers us a persuasive diagnosis of our present politics, but no cure. As a child of the mass political age, I’m willing to try mass politics again, however tedious it will be to put down our phones.

It will be up to us sign up for party membership, to unionize our workplaces, to sit in boring committee meetings until we get our motions passed, to patch together our atomized societies and mobilize them — while many of our friends and neighbours carry on with futile, hyperpolitical thrills on social media.