What ‘Hyperpolitics’ Explains About This Era

one of the hardest things to do is describe the overall shape texture rhythm of a political era. We'll talk about wokeness, woke one was crazy, we'll talk about Trumpism, but getting at the overall form in which they all take place is really really difficult. One idea for this is taking off a bit recently that I've been hearing a lot around me is hyper politicization. Hyper politics is a concept from Anton Jager. He's a historian and contripping writer at New York Times opinion and he's also the author of this book hyper politics extreme politicization without political consequences. And what he's describing is an era in which politics feels like it is everywhere. The intensity of political opinion and commitment is really really high that things are swinging wildly from one side to the other, but things are not securely attached to political institutions and structures. And so these powerful periods of intense mobilization don't seem to have lasting consequence. I think it's a really interesting way of trying to get at what is happening behind what we're all feeling. He joins me now. Anton Jager, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So let's just begin at the beginning. What is hyper politics? Hyper politics is a concept that describes a change in political culture in the West in which we see an increase in political activity on a variety of metrics, whether it's voting, protest, but also political violence, but that increase in political activity is not matched by an increasing institutional strength. So if you look at the indices of union membership, party membership, or other civil society organizations, those have stagnated or have continued to decline, and that is a situation I think which doesn't really have a proper precedent across the 20th century, maybe also not the 19th. And for that reason I introduced a concept to make sense of a new confusing political present. So you're describing a situation in which people and moments feel more political. In some cases they're doing more political things. You have huge mass protests like in Black Lives Matter, but there is a de-institutionalized reality to politics. They're not parts of parties in the way they once were union, civic organizations are in decline. And so they're not civically or institutionally attached. It's this kind of mixture of political activity, absent institutional membership. That's right, yes. And of course the story I'm telling is a historical one and it comes with contrast. So if you're using these two axes politicization, as I call it, an institutionalization, you can get a certain chronology of political forms as well. So I talk about the mass politics of the 20th century, which could be highly politicized, particularly let's say the 1920s and 1930s, but was also very heavily institutionalized. So it's be politically active, often meant to be in an institution. And I contrast it also to the post-politics of the 1990s of the 2000s, as it's called, in which you had a decline on both of those indices, so low institutionalization and low politicization. And what we're looking at now, indeed, is this strain's scissors shape. Namely, a lot of political activity has also become easier, and it's become more necessary to pursue it. But it doesn't really have an institutional form, so it feels very inquiryate. And as I claim, that also means it doesn't have as many policy consequences as it used to have. So I don't want to question your definition of your own concept. But one thing I feel like that doesn't quite pick up on, but which is part of why this idea is resonated, is the hyperness of hyperpolitics, this feeling of things rising and falling with incredible rapidity. It's like one year you're deep inside Black Lives Matter and Wokeness, and then it's like the vibes have shifted to Trump, and then they come all the way back. Nothing seems to last, but everything seems incredibly important. You have a very thoughtful, iconic style here. But I want to get at this kind of frenzied nature of it, which you do describe in the book. Yes, so I think the volatility or the frenzy you're pointing at is a quintessential feature of the phenomenon describing, because what do institutions do with political activity? They stabilize it, and they give it longevity over a longer time period. And if you don't have these institutions to tie your political action to, and also let's say the mechanisms of delegation or representation that come with these institutions, I'd say also maybe discipline. That means that short-termism is the de facto mode of a lot of political action, because you can be enormously interested in investing in one question for a couple of weeks. You follow the media cycle, but then once let's say the popularity fades or it doesn't seem as urgent, you move on to the next thing. And there's no institution that's actually there to set the agenda to help you articulate a long-term vision that might unite your politics across all these short-term issues. So the hyper has both spatial and a temporal side to it. Spatial insofar as it can go everywhere and it can gather loads and loads of people. I mean, there are record numbers in terms of turnout, not just in the US, but across the West for protesting the last 10 to 15 years. But it's also hyper in that it doesn't cover a very long time span, and almost like a political market, you can invest in a product and then when you see that its value is plunging, you can dump your shares and you can move on to the next issue. One of my critiques of the book is that you often will gesture at what seems very obvious about this to me, which is that this is digital politics. This is online politics. This is algorithmically mediated politics. You write about hyperpolitics. It is dynamic, intense and polarizing, yet also ideologically diffuse, visibly modeled on the fluidity of the online world. You don't spend much time in the book describing or theorizing the fluidity of the online world. But I want to spend some time on it here because the politics you're describing, the politics I recognize and live through, this just feels like not even what institutions are or are not able to do now. As much as politics, which is fundamentally downstream of what we pay attention to and our attention is fundamentally shaped now by algorithms that care about controversy, they care about newness that are hunting amorally and constantly for whatever we're going to rise out of people. And if you build politics on that completely bizarre superstructure of attention, this is what you get. I'm broadly in agreement and I don't think it necessarily contradicts or is in friction with the thesis I'm defending. I'm a bit hesitant about a lot of views, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years, that assign not just the primary but as we say a monocosal role to digital technology, where somehow the internet explains everything and then the book shouldn't have been called hyperpolitics but just extremely online politics. And then it's just a book about the digitalization or the increasingly digital nature of our political lives. I want to resist that collapse or I want to resist equating hyperpolitics just with extremely online politics. For the reason that many of the theories we've had, let's say that try to describe the Brexit vote or the Trump vote through something like Russian bots or bought Facebook ads. There was of course there in the Arab Spring already a theory that these were so-called Facebook revolutions, that it was digital platforms that were really driving the upsurge. But also recently the idea that the reason social media is playing this role is primarily because it's the only thing we pay attention to. And I don't think that's very compelling. For the very reason that you also have to pay attention to the environment in which digital media was launched. And there it's not as if social media did all the work on itself. It's more that the civic or social landscape in which it entered, it found a population that was ready to experience so much of politics online. Of course these algorithms are addictive but the question is always, why does it stick? Why are people so taken to it? And at the same time a lot of the reason their protest doesn't just have to do with hallucinations online. These are very, very real and very important topics, whether it's mass incarceration or police violence in the US. Let's say inequality but surely on the right did say migration. And these are not simply things that digital platforms have somehow conjured up out of nothing. It's more that I think social media has acted as a magnifying glass and an accelerator of certain trends that came before but which I think surpassed the digital. And if we reduce everything to the digital We are only having a conversation about platforms when I think it should be be a much broader conversation. I always think of the conversation about what you're calling digital as a conversation about attention. And you can have that conversation well or poorly. And I agree with you, dissolving things down to Russian bots or Facebook ads is ridiculous. I didn't believe that in the 2016 election. I don't believe it now. But let me push this a little bit. Because when I say it's my critique of the book, I don't mean I think you have it wrong in the book. I actually just wish there was a chapter on it in the book. And one thing I was thinking about, as I read the argument you're making about institutions, is well, what do I see happening with the institutions we have today? Because it's not as if all institutions are gone or nobody is part of a party. You can look at the DSA, which is rising in America, and is as a real institutional formation. There are people who devote their lives to the Democratic Party, to their Republican Party. And one thing I would say about all of these people, not literally every individual, but many of them, is they exhibit the tendencies of hyper-politics, even more than normal people do. Right? The tendency to get overly invested in what gets called online, the current thing, to have incredible waves of sentiment, but then not be able to translate it over a long period of time. The tendency to look back on something like two or three or four or five years ago, something recent. I think, oh my god, what were we just doing, right? Famously AOC, just given an interview where she said, "Woke One was crazy." I have a local city councilman that has this saying, "Woke One was crazy." "Woke One was crazy." And I think that what's important is that we have to assess what happened. I mean, did the movement go too far with some of those positions? I mean, you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police. Well, I think that, during this time, and especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the over-term window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think what she's describing there is the way online politics led ideas that are real and rooted in the real world, to sort of take some forms and be expressed in ways that people no longer wish to defend. And so the way I think there's a connection here is that the people, even who are institutions and the way institutions work and collectivities work, those people are also communicating with each other online and tweeting at each other and retweeting each other. Donald Trump communicates with the Republican Party through truth social. So sort of saying there are these two spheres, institutions and the digital world. It doesn't feel real to me. I watch people who leave these institutions communicating with each other through this digital world and thus the institutions end up in a kind of like a, like a, the same sort of back and forth, slightly wild oscillation quality. Yes, it's very clear that the types of politicization that are typical of the contemporary world, also have an effect on how people affiliate with institutions. There I would say hyperpolitics obviously moves at different speeds in different groups. So with the political professional and the, let's say, voter who maybe hasn't voted in a couple of elections and isn't professionally involved in politics, obviously hyperpolitics going to have very different effects. So the volatility or the short-termism, which we detect in a general population and their relationship to politics, will also find its counterpart even with subjects that find themselves in these institutions, which I think is a striking illustration for AOC but could make the argument for a couple of other figures as well, is that the reason one can easily rescind certain positions or then step back on commitments that were made quite vociferously a couple of years ago is that there doesn't really seem to be a solid ideology behind many of these political choices and preferences and, and this is important for an institutional side of the story, there isn't a sort of program to which you can tie herself. And across the 20th century, I mean, political parties always had leaders or certain charismatic figures that led them forward. They always had people that were more individualized as a member of that party than others. But at the same time, there was a program around which everyone could orient themselves. And this means that changing or reneging on some of those aspects of that program came with, with costs. And the question with AOC is, well, she has a relationship to the DSA, the DSA is obviously not an official political party, it's a socialist organization. But the question is, what is a DSA's program she's listening to or she feels she has to be accountable to? And how can they discipline her when she then decides that she now wants to pursue a different political path? And I think that's the hyperpolitics at different speeds I'm talking about. In the general population, it's, let's say, hopping from one theme to another, but even for political professionals, it means a decline in ideological consistency or even the question of, what is my party line or what is my long-term vision for the transformation of society? You tell a historical story in the book about these other periods and politics, and maybe it's worth sitting in one of them for a few minutes, which is practically mass membership politics. And I think you're more describing European political parties in this than American political parties, which have always been somewhat different, but it's such a different world to try to mentally inhabit, if you're an American in the year 2026, that I'd like you to sort of draw that picture, that what it was like to be at least in some of these parties in this other period that you're describing. So the portrait I'm painting is very much reliant on cases on the left, but I also want to highlight that it's not exclusive to the left. There are right-wing variants of this, but the case was that to be a member of a political party was not something optional and was often something that was handed down in families. So it was hereditary in many cases, describing it as voluntary is almost tricky insofar as the social stigma for leaving a party or for not voting for it would be quite severe. You might have to move out of your neighborhood. And at the same time, it also meant that your electoral choice, which very much a function of your institutional membership, there was no question who you were going to vote for because you were already a member. And this means that your political preferences were completely determined by the affiliation. And that obviously also meant that the party had a lot of control over your private lives as well. So there are cases in the 1970s, for example, that members of the French Communist Party were not allowed to buy certain cars or drive them. Of course, Christian democratic parties had very strong views on, let's say, what happened in the bedroom. And it was a very authoritarian world, in many cases as well. I don't want to pretend as if it was egalitarian, as if people had complete control over these parties. But membership was immersive. It was sometimes something that could last a lifetime and for which the exit costs were quite high. Now, of course, the US is very different because the US never developed mass parties in the way that Europe did. That probably had to do with the fact that the US democratized very early. At the same time, I want to resist the idea that American parties haven't been profoundly transformed in the last 50 to 60 years, the period I'm covering. Because even as parties that are more part of the state than of society, they still had this hinterland of civil society organizations, particularly in the case of the Democratic Party, for example, unions or different minority group interests. The Black Church should be a good example of this, I think. Yes. And of course, religious institutions are massively important and have been for both parties for a while now. But even as that hinterland has started to shrink or desiccate, that also meant that even American parties that are not mass parties have reconfigured their relationship to society as a whole. Now for a very, very different function than they did across the 20th century, of course, as I say, it is a different story because there never was the membership model as we knew it in Europe. And this means that the story of hyperpolitics American style has to be told differently than the European variant. One of the things that I thought about reading that part of the book and you're signaling it here is that I think at a high gloss, that sounds good to people, right? This idea that we have hollow political parties now and everything just moves too fast. You can't stretch ideology over an actual structure of civic belonging and civic membership and civic action. But these much more totalizing parties that you describe, it led to a lot of horror among other things. And you sort of gestured the parties of the right, fascist parties, the Nazis, that it is the case that ideology could bring you into a much more immersive world where the cost of exit was much higher. And the pressure for total ideological indoctrination was more constant. So is this a thing to look back on with nostalgia? indoctrination is not a concept, I think we look back on with a lot. of fondness and having a party sit there and tell me how I should look at everything in the world and be able to socially or possibly professionally and patronage models punish me if I don't look at it that way. That's not a world I'm so eager to live in either. No, so I talked about the Inigilitarian aspects of that system. The book also wants to maintain a focused ambiguity without too much nostalgia about what this world was, how unpleasant it could be for certain people. It starts, of course, with portraits of figures in the 90s and 2000s or happy to deliberate it from that world. We also experience a degree of individual freedom precisely because those institutions don't dominate their lives anymore and also with the idea that one cannot clone a dinosaur so we cannot take the DNA of those parties and implement them in the present and hope that they will revive and survive the current environment. At the same time, it is also very clear that there is a question of power there. People don't simply join institutions because they don't want to be lonely. That's also a reason and I think it's part of the story that the book also tells in the crisis of sociability. The loneliness epidemic, as it's called, is obviously also a part of the de-institutionalization the book is trying to analyze. But except for the sociability element, parties are also guarantees of collective power. I mean, there are instruments for collective action. And as they have declined and as sometimes there are immersive or totalitarian aspects have disappeared, there has also been an increasing difficulty of translating individual preferences into collective action. Particularly in the West, I think there are a few exceptions to this, maybe China and India, that do have these weird mass parties left before the rest. The decline of parties has gone hand in hand with an inability or declining gradient of popular power, particularly from below. Can you expand on that? That's the thing people sometimes say and then move very fast. It defends that position for me that somebody sitting around in American politics in 1973 or 1954 was more capable of translating individual politics into collective power into governmental reform. Well, there is political science research about this. So obviously about the negative correlation, for example, between public preferences and policy results. So I mean, the typical case, for example, is Medicare for all where there has been a majority for now for a while, but the chance of it getting implemented. But this is a very weak example. Different states, I've covered these fights. Medicare for all, you pull it, it pulls high, you then tell people, here's what the taxes will be, your insurance is going away, it pulls low. And it's a very common thing, you know, complex policy, you can frame it at the outset and people like, great, and it's a gigantic change and they are very, very afraid when you begin actually putting the change on them. So in this comparative take, you're making, like I want to hear this defended that we were so much better at getting what we wanted politically in another era. I found a lot of the political science on this one. I do read it a little bit confused. So that's why I'm pushing this point before we just skate by it. Yeah, it's also important to keep in mind that this is not the only factor feeding into this capacity. There is a question of state capacity, there are other kind of channels that need to be examined. There is just one element, namely, how is the decline of these institutions negatively affected the capacity for policy change? And I do think if you look at the heyday, let's say of what is called the new deal order in the 1930s and the 1940s, when the American welfare state, which was never as spectacular as the European variant was built, there is a very clear correlation with mass power there at the time. And it is also very, very clear that after McCarthyism, and particularly after the subduing of the civil rights movement, the fall of this mass power goes hand in hand with the difficulty of actually getting concessions, particularly for an America's business class. Now in Europe, it's different, but it's also very clear that for example, Europe's welfare states were not just built by technocrats, but were built through the exercise of mass pressure. Now, once again, mass pressure is not intrinsic good, it can have very negative consequences, but at the same time, to me, very, very clearly is a case that the set of social rights that were built up in Europe and the US in the middle of the century were also a function of mass power, not only a function of mass power. I mean, it seems indisputable to me that the decline of union power in the US probably has something to do with the staggering levels of inequality that the US currently has. Now, it's a correlation, and then the causal mechanism is complicated, but I think that's one illustration of how institutional power can translate into policy results more concretely. One of the reasons I'm pushing on this is that I think there is a widespread view, and I think this view is correct, that people feel particularly powerless over politics right now. And so then like the next step in thinking about that view is whether it is a perception or whether it is true. And you know, I would tell the story, you just told a little bit differently, right? You have an American political system that is very resistant to kinds of reform for very, very long periods of time. The great depression fractures the system. It functionally annihilates the Republican party for a period of time. FDR does not pass all that policy because all of a sudden union density jumps. FDR passes all that policy because there is a level of democratic dominance over Congress that is unimaginable to us today. Lyndon Johnson's great society where you have another big period of expansion of the welfare state comes after Kennedy is assassinated. Kennedy is not getting things done. The civil rights movement is stymied for a very long time by a southern power over Congress. The filibuster is used basically exclusively to stop civil rights bills for decades in American politics. And so you have these sort of punctuated moments when a lot can get done. But they tend to come for unusual reasons. Now I'm not saying mass power is important in that. And I do agree with you, by the way, that union density is a reason we've had inequality rise becauseality that, as you say, people can argue over. The reason I bring all this up is that one of the things it does not always seem obviously true to me is that the average person had so much more power in these times. You needed this sort of moment and then like the overdened window cracks open and all the sudden a bunch of things happen. But it's very, very contingent. It's not a linear process in which the work you are doing as a citizen day in and day out is feeling like it is getting anywhere most of the time. One of the things going back to attention, which I just think is under theorized in politics so much as we do talk about it, is that people today, they know so much more about the world. They know so much more about it so constantly than they could before. So you have all of this information and the information is now tuned to be much more arousing emotionally than it was at another time. One of the things that I suspect is it is the mixture of how much you know and how much you are being made to feel at all moments. Mix in with like the powerlessness that actually is real, right? The amount of how an individual has and then the amount of institutions you're tied to is low. The creeds is feeling that everything is being done without your consent, without your control. There's no way for you to affect it. In America now with this sort of red blue system where you live in a blue state and you know your vote barely matters in national elections, you know, same thing in very red states, right? Everybody knows how your state is going to go so what does it matter how you vote? That that I think we always want to put this as a question of individual capacity, but is it a question of individual capacity or is it a question of the amount you're being pulled into politics and then your absence of capacity conflict with each other for you? Yes to both with some modifications maybe I'd say. So for the first I think that individual powerlessness is also not completely without president. So the heyday of mass politics in for example the 30s and 40s maybe a bit in the 50s was also the start of the nuclear race which to many people seemed as the supreme expression of powerlessness in the 20th century is the most anti-democratic weapon as George Orwell said. So it's not as if that wasn't with us before and I also don't want to pretend as if re-institutionalization or rebuilding those institutions today will automatically mean that it will become easier to implement certain policies because there's also a question of where power has moved even on the level of the state. So I don't think then in the 50s and 60s let's say unelected bodies both in Europe and the US like central banks had as much power as they do today and they're not let's say subject to popular pressure or even electoral pressure in the same way. So there's no immediate guarantee and it's one factor among many. So you do I think have to have certain coalitions within the elite together with mass power to get some of these policy results done and it could also be that the constellation is favorable and then it turns out that it works. I do think that one of the most important factors in the policy blockage we're witnessing across both sides of the Atlantic in the last 20 years is that the factor of mass power has been severely reduced even as politicization has risen and that probably explains why it's become more difficult. When it comes to the paradox of increasing visibility or the dynamics of contemporary political mobilization I fully agree. I mean the kinds of footage you can now get beamed onto your smartphone screens whether it's the genocide in the Middle East or say mass murder on the other side of the planet increases political awareness greatly so there's an immediacy to the experience but there's also a feeling of complete helplessness and I do think that's different in that if you you heard about this? a nuclear race in the '40s and '50s, you read about it, but it's not something you could sort of livestream into your living room all the time. That is something you can do. Now, particularly if you spend a lot of time with social media, and that probably increases the feeling of helplessness. (gentle music) One of the other things I think is interesting about social media is that it does create an answer to the question it poses. You have seen something terrible in front of you and what you can do is post or comment or like. And I do think it creates this somewhat confusion between action and effect. It's an action that may not have an effect, but it does sort of complete an instant stress cycle. You've just seen something terrible. We have to do something. Well, in the place you're in, what you do is post. And again, one reason that I focus here is that I think this is true for political elites and for anything else. And I think one of the unusual things about this whole story we're in is that the elites are more rattled than anyone else's. So you go back to Walter Lippmann's book, Public Opinion, which I think comes out in 1922 if I'm not wrong, right around there. And Walter Lippmann's answer to the reality that the world outside our heads differs from the world inside our heads that our pictures of reality are always flawed. So how do we engage with this world that we don't really understand? Is this famously quite unsatisfying? Well, there should be these technocratic elite panels and they know everything. And one of the ways that that ends up being an obviously wrong answer is it assumed the elites would not be rattled. But in fact, nobody is more brain-attled right now by social media than Donald Trump or Elon Musk, than the top people in the White House, that there is such a, that nobody is more intentionally hooked on this kind of information than the people who've made politics their life's work. And that just creates, I think, a strange thing because normal people will then turn to people who are engaged in politics all the time for cues on what to do and how to feel and where to join. And not always, but often, they're the worst people to ask or to follow because they're the most crazed by this form of political attention. - Yeah, so this is a book that's mainly written from below in some sense of, I mean, it's not just for the left, but it's written from the left. And that means it describes the effects of, like, the declining cost of political expression through the online. So as you say, you're faced with an obvious wrong or a moral scandal. And before you maybe had to write a newspaper editor, you had to, let's say, contact your local party chief or you had to go and stand in middle of a square and start shouting, now you can do something else. You can express yourself politically, much more cheaply and easily than before. But then there's a question of diminishing returns as well. Like, it's easy, but what are the actual effects? Now, that is a question of how the declining cost of political expression affects popular capacity for social change. When you look at it from the top of society, we can see, as you say, that there's also a variant of hyperpolitics there. I think the motives of government of the second Trump administration, it's short-termism, it's incapacity to plan, it's unwillingness to plan. It also indicates that deinstitutionalization or incoherence between different factions of the elite has also had severe consequences, let's say, for the people who are actually in charge. I mean, there's a really spectacular example of this of Elon Musk being interviewed by the editor of the economist recently. And I mean, it gets very brutal. But do you see why this makes people think that this man who has always power, he's the world's richest man, he thinks he has a right to influence our politics. It makes people, we started this conversation saying superlatives, it's why people love you. I mean, some people do love you. - Yes, some people do. - But do you understand why? Do you think what you're doing is helpful for Western democracy? - Maybe some people do love me. And that's probably true. I don't care. But the fact that, as you pointed out, a quarter billion people follow me is that I think a lot more people actually like me than don't. And I think a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize. - When he openly insults her also afterwards on his own private platform. But the striking thing about the interview is that these are two members of the same class. They're shouting at each other in the middle of the public sphere. Normally in a different situation, you'd expect some class solidarity from both sides. And then we were in this together, we have to think about a common project. And the elite is severely divided, particularly in the US, but also in Europe. And they don't actually have institutions to reconcile their social, sectoral, geographic interests. And what the online world does is that it, I think, aggravates the dispolarization to such an extent that they cannot think long-term about what their interests are. So hyperpolitics, I think, has compounding and very severe consequences for the elite as well. It's just that the book doesn't provide a full theoretical model of how you should probe these effects. - I want to come back to that in a second, as you did write a very interesting piece in the new left review that is more in this direction and thinking about Donald Trump. But quickly, because as you say, the book is written from within the left, something you said there pinged for me, which is that you would expect a kind of class solidarity between Elon Musk and the editor of the economist. Can I ask why you would expect that? Because when I look back on past interviews, you have huge divisions between the elites of different countries at all times. I mean, Musk is a highly right-wing American elite who has highly politicized himself. He's not just a random CEO at this point. The press is often very antagonistic. I think about, say, the buckly, the doll debates where they're threatening to punch each other in the face on live television. - Yeah, it was probably a crypto-netsy. - Let's stop calling them, you'll just goddamn face. - You'll stay plastered. Gentlemen, let's go. - Tell me about your intuition that there is an absence now of elite class solidarity when in the past that existed. Because I know my read of history, you think about my cartheism, right, where they're getting each other like destroyed from public life, you know, on the assumption being a communist whether or not it's true, that elite politics has often been very rivalrous and that assumptions of solidarity have never held at any for any great number of them. - So I have to confess that this is a manifestation of a vulgar Marxism that's probably looking in me where I see two creatures that should have the same class instinct and should be naturally sympathetic to each other. But as you say, actually elite division or elite rivalry is the rule rather than the exception across history, particularly in the US, because the country's so large, you have all kinds of economic sectors. It's very difficult to unite each faction with the elite into one organization. The only periods in American history and I tell you also in European history and more broadly on a global scale that you do have elite unity and solidarity is when there's a working class threat on the other side. So when it comes to anti communism or quailching the labor movement under Reagan, that is really the last time you had a concerted employer offensive, but once that opponent is severely weakened and fractures, you immediately have elite factionism showing up. So yes, you're right, they should not like each other or they're not destined to like each other. Still, I think it's striking because it is violence within a specific class and it should not be confused for the type of radical polarization that we've often been taught to think about in the last 10 years where somehow societies highly polarized. I think a lot of recent politics can be more explained through elite polarization rather than social polarization as a whole, but that's still, I mean, a different discussion. - Oh, this, I wrote a book on polarization a couple years back and this is actually the argument of the book that the elites are polarizing. And then they're giving the public much more polarized choices which is polarizing the public in turn and it creates a kind of flywheel. And I think that's very true. I want to go back to this piece we did in the new left review where, which is more focused on Trump and Trump's second term. And you quote the political scientist Ivan Krastev, who writes that the essence of the Trumpian revolution is the implosion of time itself. Tell me a bit about that idea. - Well, I mean, it's a fascinating piece which he wrote for the financial times. It's a bit speculative. So it's trying to make a couple of observations about Trump's mode of rule, which I mean anyone who's turned on the television or logged on to their social media platforms has probably gotten a taste of in the last two years. And it is obviously, I think, very different from previous American presidents. But there's one thing that really stands out and that is a short termism or the fact that there's no thinking beyond the 24 hour new cycle. In fact, a lot of political decisions seem to be informed by the presumed effects those decisions will have on the media. cycle and on its perceived popularity. That doesn't mean there isn't a court around Trump that feeds ideas into the machine. So obviously there are different ideological factions, whether it's Rubio or it's Coby, that have certain plans on how to reestablish America in a jamming in the new century, but it seems that what Trump does is that he takes these suggestions and then he evaluates them on their efficacy in terms of media effects. Will this keep me in the news for the next 24 hours if I bomb this country or if I do this, and then afterwards for the next 48 hours will come up with a different plan. And I thought it's a very illuminating observation because it depersonalizes Trump to some extent as the symptom of a wider malaise that can also be institutionally explained. It's because everyone's so personally dependent on his caprisis and because the GOP despite some theories is not a mass party, it's still let's say a small Camarilla or a small clique that is very strongly attached to the state. That probably also explains why the administration could not think a week in a head or two weeks in head. I mean it's a striking contrast with a Chinese Communist Party that is still formulating five-year plans or five-year designs and a Trump admin that I think can revise a decision during I mean one day. Yeah, you have this line in there that what if short-termism is structural now? And I've been thinking about that line because I do think there is this constant question around Trump and Trumpism of whether or not with him you're looking at a very idiosyncratic psychology that is highly tuned to the particular moment I've often described him as a like a human engagement algorithm and he really reflects to me the way Twitter thinks and the way X or true social whatever it is feel. The people around him don't necessarily you know I got a lot of critiques to make of a JD Vance, a Marco Rubio, a Stephen Miller. They're not actually short-term thinkers all of them consider things on a longer time frame thinking a more to other political elites recognizably ideological way. Joe Biden was pretty end of his administration one of the things that his defenders were saying was that his plans were measured in decades but unfortunately elections happen in you know mere years and so there's a question of whether what Trump is is a kind of harbinger of what is coming or what is really going on the short-termism you know for reasons of both the institutionalization and maybe online algorithms and other things is coming and he's like a tuning fork for the future or not but I do look at a place like the UK and they're like running through prime ministers at incredible clip like there is a kind of volatility out there that is not affecting China in the same way and so yeah I guess I'd like to hear you talk more about to what degree you think this is short-term is a misstructural to what degree you think the Trumpism that you're describing there is distinctive to a kind of person is this simply an adjustment period in a kind of a new formation of technology how do you see that yeah I mean it's a loaded metaphor but I think some Darwinian reading in that you have the species and they have the environment and the environment has obviously changed that it's the structural story we're telling but there does seem to be one species or one particular example of that species that really flourishes in this new environment and that's Trump and I do think there is a personal dimension to it I mean he himself went through the transition of different media regimes he was the man of television the kind of show man of reality TV the 80s 90s and 2000s and then he I think handily transitioned or moved into the air of the algorithm and social media but it's very clear that in the case of Rubio and Vance the ideology is actually a burden and it's precisely because Trump is unburdened by any ideological convictions this doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't believe anything it's more that ideology as a kind of cognitive frame that filters your decisions is not something that is very familiar with he has other concerns that come first and that probably also allows him to be such a show man and that's why he was able to win those two elections and I think someone like Vance who you can sense is opportunistic but is more invested in the idea of ideology wants the right books in which he talks about his conversions and expose or sorry expounds his worldview I'm not sure that his pitch to the contemporary media adult volatile voter will be as convincing as that of the show man himself and it's very clear that some politicians also in Europe have tried to ape that Trump in style it's it's hard I mean there is a there's a certain skill or even artisanal quality to how he does it which once again is a question of structure and agency at the same time Trump himself is a unusual case but Maga Maga as a kind of broader movement that for many of its people you can really live in it really does have ideas increasingly it has institutions that are associated with it and leaders who are associated with it you can live in its world it can give you a sort of meaning it has rallies it has in some ways it seems very much more like past eras of politics do than anything we've seen more recently so from your perspective is Maga hyperpolitics is it the coming of something new how do you see what is happening there on the American right I think it's an interesting and complicated question because the first Trump term and the second term term are obviously very different and I do think the second term is much more institutionalized I mean for the first election victory he himself and his entourage were surprised that even one that was in the case second time around the Heritage Foundation project 25 that indicates that they were better prepared and that there was a project of institutionalization which they consciously pursued the question whether Maga is a mass movement and whether they've managed to reinvent I'd say even certain forms of 20th century fall right mass politics which I think is also related to the so-called F question debate whether Trump is a fascist or not I think yes the second term is different from the first there has been a weaponization for examples of parts of the security stages eyes there has been an attempt to create a solid base of supporters that will remain with them also through the fact that there's now all kinds of state funding involved and of course these kind of paramilitary organizations do resemble the 20th century squads that we usually associate with fascist politics at the same time the question always remains whether there will be a Trumpism without Trump there's maybe a question whether Tucker Carlson or Margie Taylor Green and some of the first Trumpers now see themselves as carrying that movement forwards also by dissenting from certain types of GOP orthodoxy I'm just less convinced that they have the institutional structure except for a couple of podcasts and media channels to keep that going so that is obviously an open question we'll see what happens but the GOP has not transformed itself into a mass membership party the buy-in of a lot of the agents of eyes does seem to be heavily reliant not on their ideological agreement but more on their financial opportunities they have in joining the security state and when they lose the midterms and we'll see obviously what happens with the next election I'm just not sure that it will persist for such a long time there could of course be another mass movement that goes further and radicalizes it but I don't think that's the same as a party throughout the 20th century that could buy its time across cycles of five to ten to even 20 years and then strike when Mag I think is so beholden to these contemporary media cycles that are very short and very volatile that it could yeah as easily rise as it could form one thing that we've been talking about here is the way institutions but we've I think primarily been talking about civic institutions have eroded I think there's another question which is about the way that the institutions of governance and power have ossified and this maybe goes back to what you were saying earlier about the ways in which the system might have become more resistant not in this case to me just to individual power but almost to any form of power which is to say that in America where you know we have a much more closely divided politics where it's less like you're less likely to get bipartisan compromise you get more filibusters your ability to pass big bills has gone down over time and that is true even when power is arranged behind the bills a guy remember for Barack Obama you are the Chamber of Commerce and the AFLCIO both supporting an infrastructure bill it went nowhere there was a lot of power behind immigration bills in that era they went nowhere right because you could kill so much more in Congress there are so many more ways to wrap things up so much more you can do in the courts in Europe it's a situation I know less well but certainly there's a broad sense that the European Union has created more slowness more powers that are acting upon you from far away. And I wonder if some of the movement of political energy to spaces of discourse of posting of things that on the one hand are low effort, but at least some kind of answer comes back to you quickly. I wonder if it reflects to some degree a disillusionment with what you can get done in institutions that are now very hard to get anything done in. Just, you know, they've been around a long time. They're balancing out a lot of different interests. People know how to work them better. Money can talk very loudly, but I actually always think it doesn't talk as loudly as people think it does because I've watched a lot of money fail to get its way in American politics and elsewhere. It's just so much easier to block anything than to achieve anything that almost people don't believe in achievements. I think, I mean, George Shores is of course a spectacular example of someone who's been spraying millions at certain causes. And if you look at where the world is headed politically, it's not very clear that he has the total control, which some conspiracy thinkers attribute to him. I think, yes, it is absolutely true that even on the level of the elite, so there's been a complete legalization of, let's say, outside election spending also in the US. It's also become easier in Europe, but it's not very clear that this increasing lobbying power actually also makes it easier to achieve your policy aims. And that, I mean, that is a paradox, right? Because you could say, okay, social change is become impossible from below. But if you say also from above, it's become very difficult to pursue. There's much more profound puzzle to be examined there. I think there is a question about the story of deinstitutionalization as affecting society, but also affecting the state. Because what the adjustments in the 80s and 90s, a story that's often told us neoliberalism, but which I think goes much deeper, is that it on the one hand entails a concerted attack on certain institutions, which are seen as hampering economic recovery, particularly unions, which are blamed for inflation, and thereby you have to get rid of them to basically restore economic normality. But on the level of the state, there's also a concerted displacement towards unelected, non-electural bodies, also to keep them shielded from certain elite pressure groups, to say, a central bank has the government, the interest of everyone, and thereby they shouldn't be meddled with. But what's interesting is that that does two things. It did move power to institutions that are not open to pressure, whether it's elite or popular pressure. Obviously, it's still easier for the elite to get access, but not as easy as as many people think it is. And at the same time, it increases the attractiveness of the veto option you're describing. So if we could not get certain things through these institutions, what we have to do is just build a kill switch or create something that at least makes it possible to stop something if we don't want it going through. And that also, I think, becomes attractive from the lower half of society. I do think that just eliminating these veto capacities is not going to solve the problem either, because the problem is much more structural, and so far as the attractiveness of the veto is a function of an institutional issue that's older, and if you want to make the contrast with China, Chinese state capacity means very local without the Chinese Communist Party. And that's not just a state. That's an institution that plays, I mean, a very strange role in your knighting classes, but also different factions of the elite. I don't see an American equivalent of the CCP, let alone a European equivalent that could play that role. I think China is such an interesting counter-example here. I don't ever pretend to know the structure of Chinese public opinion, but across a number of measures that people do look at, and I do think we, you know, feel like we have some confidence, and there is more optimism and sense of agency around things like AI and China than in America, less pessimism. And, you know, China is a place where, as an individual, you really don't have saying governance. There's very little you can do to affect what the top levels of the CCP are going to do. On the other hand, somebody is doing something constantly, and change is happening, and movement is happening. And even if you are not the one acting upon the world, the world is there to be acted upon. I am not, I would not want to live under that system, I am not lauding it in that respect. But I do think it sits now as a kind of counter-example to a lot of Western systems where it almost has created this choice of, do you want rights and inaction, or few rights and action? Trump is interesting from this perspective to me, because he comes into office and is able to make a very big show of cracking the system, it appears in half, and doing things which people thought couldn't be done. He signs all these executive orders, including one ending birthright citizenship and throws him out into the crowd, and it looks like a WWE rally mixed with a governance function. But it turns out he has not cracked the code. He is passing less legislation than other presidents. Many of his things end up turned back in courts. Doge moves with incredible force and speed for a little while and then collapses entirely. He seems overwhelmed by events. He is in an Iran war, he clearly has no control over. And so Trump had maybe an intentional answer. He was able to create the spectacle of things happening. But then your member of the public, and what has really happened that is different now for you or your price is lower, does America seem like it is doing better? Is anybody really in control? And the answer again is no. And now Trump is falling asleep at meetings, and they're going to lose the midterms. And so that sense of nobody isn't, I am not in control, but nor is anybody else persists. And I think you have this dilemma right now of a West that seems in a kind of political drift, often a dangerous one. But it is not like the illiberal forces in the West have mastered the system either. China is moving very fast, and I think it exerts a kind of pressure on the West to move faster. But it's not really clear how to respond to it. And I just wonder about the politics that creates on both sides, the politics of action there, but without much individual agency. The politics of individual agency here, but without much ultimate promise of action. Yes, I mean, I'd be careful to say there's no such thing as input legitimacy in China either. So there is obviously not the electoral system that exists in the West, but it's very clear that for example, protests around COVID did have an effect on how, let's say the Chinese leadership re-figured its policies. And there is a kind of distinction one can make between input and output legitimacy where parts of the West have seen an increase in input legitimacy. There's increasing turnout in elections when it comes to output legitimacy, which a Chinese state is so spectacularly good at. It's not very clear that that's happening. To me, the question is whether the discussion about state capacity or the discussion about getting some of these policy packages through can be linked not just to a discussion about what the state can do, but rather what institutions are necessary for it. Because as you say, de-institutionalization also makes it harder for elites to plan. And Europe is, I mean, a striking instance of this, where in the face of let's say Chinese competition, but also like the Trumpian onslaught of tariffs, the geopolitical rivalry they're currently embroiled in, European elites are simply not coming up with an answer at all. I mean, there are a couple of plans that are floating around, but it's not as if there's an articulated plan. And for that, you need some kind of institutional infrastructure to basically unite these different factions and make sure that you're relaunches itself into the 2020s. But it's strange, because you're put into a position, particularly as someone like me coming from the left, where you kind of have to help elites save themselves. I would say, like, please get your act together and find some kind of organ that can coordinate between all the different factions of you. And I mean, pointing out elite failure in itself is not a policy, but that's mostly what let's say commentary on European politics has become in the last 10 years. One of the ways you're telling a story is you have mass politics, and that goes to the sort of more post-politics, like the calmer political period of the 90s, you know, your Bill Clinton's, your Tony Blair's, not everything is political. We're at the end of history. Everybody can calm down now. Communism is fallen. That thing gives way to the period after the financial crisis, you know, anti-politics, occupied Wall Street, the Tea Party, political movements are rising, but that fundamentally hate the idea of political institutions that are not trying to, in ways that are traditionally recognizable, to take them over, even build power in the way we normally think about it, and then you get hyperpolitics. And one way of thinking about hyperpolitics as a period is that it's actually just fundamentally destructive. But necessarily so, that institutional story we're telling now is one in which culture institution Is Donald Trump a good answer? No, he's not a good answer, but he demonstrated that somebody with more planning could do something like Doge and maybe do it in a way that is constructive, that many things that had become ideologically rigid from how we think about trade, immigration, to China, to much more, is now opened up. You see a kind of rise on the left in American politics with the DSA and Mamdani and others in that cohort and there is a dynamism to it. I think the question is whether or not this kind of just ends up in destruction and nihilism because nothing can gain power for long enough to build something that is new and enduring, or it's actually in a Darwinian sense to go back to the metaphor you used earlier. This is a kind of necessary byproduct of revitalization, right? For Canada, for Europe, for others, that what was there is breaking down and it is we're in a messy interenium, everybody loves quoting the misquotations of Gramsci here, a time of monsters. Do you come down on one side or another of this, that we're going through a cleansing fire versus we're just going through a fire? Well, I mean, the problem with the time of Monsters' quote is that it's describing a pre-revolutionary situation, that was the age which Gramsci himself was living through in Italy. I don't think we're in that. I don't think we're in a pre-pre-revolutionary state. I do think we need to be honest about this particularly from the left. I do think there is something to be said about the revitalization story you're indicating. In that Trump at least has the refreshing effect of clarifying or forcing choice. He's ended some notion of the Tina dogma, or the there is no alternative dogma, namely that you choose between Pepsi and Coca-Cola, the election booth, and in the end it's basically the same product with a couple of tweaks. I think he has finished off that perception or that world of politics. At the same time, you can very clearly see that the increase in election turnout in the US is also a function of the fact that voters see choice. And if you want to shoot Donald Trump before an election, that means you very clearly see choice because you want to eliminate one side of the choice matrix that's presented to you. In Germany now there's an election in Saxony where they're guessing that there's been a doubling of voter turnout from 2006, let's say from 44% to 77%. I don't think that's a crisis of democracy. I think there's an economic crisis in Europe, but democracy is doing better and there's a beautiful phrase about political literacy, namely the sense that people have that the factors in their social lives, whether it's their rent, the state of their roads, the price of the product, are partially subject to political decisions. Politics has an effect in my life, it matters and it can change things. Hyper-politics has entailed an increase in political literacy to some extent. Now of course there's a lot of nonsense and let's say crazy theorizing going on online. Hyper-politics are quite exhausting and it induces a nostalgia for the 90s and 2000s which I cover in the book as well because people simply don't want to talk about woke with their uncle at family gathering, for example, but at the same time I want to make this very clear, this book is not rejecting or dismissing hyper-politicization as somehow reversible or even negative. I think it is good that people care about politics. I think we should celebrate the end of post-politics. The question is more, where is hyper-politics going and can there be such a thing as an institutional formula which extends hyper-politics beyond mere outrage? I think that is a good place to end. So I also found a question, what are three books you recommend to the audience? There are three books I chose which are a bit miscellaneous in that they belong to different genres. The first is the prophet by Isaac Deutsche, a Polish historian who only learned English I think in his early 30s and then wrote one of the greatest biographies of the 20th century. It's a three-part biography of Leon Trotsky, the famous Russian revolutionary. It's obviously beloved by Trotskyist so it has a sectarian appeal. There's a lot of neo-conservatives that were brought up on its diet, even Tony Blair said to have read it. But I read it when I was in my early 20s and I've recently revisited it also in the form of an audiobook and it is completely enchanting. It is an absolute masterpiece, not just a biography but also a political history. It also captures a moment in time that feels enormously distant but still very relevant. And it is a pleasure to listen to and read in stylistic terms. So even if you are an instinctual or aggressive anti-communist, I don't think you will not like this book. The second book is "Cheese" by Willem Elschot, written in the 1930s. This is something much more obscure, it's by a Flemish or Belgian author. And the story of the book is relatively simple, it's about a middle-aged man with a family who wants to become rich as a merchant and start selling a product he hates and never eats, namely cheese and fails at doing so. And that's the whole plot. And I think it is a beautiful parable, particularly in the 21st century, for a society in which buying and selling things has become this compulsive, almost obligatory habit. But we seem to be relatively indifferent to the products we actually are buying and selling. The final one, and I'm not sure there is already an English translation of this, is "Some Months From My Life" by the French writer Michel Welbeck. So a novelist who also plays a very prominent role in the book hyperpolitics, he appears as a protagonist in several chapters. It is not a novel but more of a personal memoir of his, in which he relates a couple of rather chaotic months in his personal life, in which he was asked to star in an erotic movie, and. Cool, a long machine then. Yes, these things happen. And after which he meditates on contemporary questions of sexuality, cultural wars, politics. But I mean, this might be strange, but it's a profoundly moving book. You really take him as a bit of a prophet to use the first book title in there. I've always meant to read some of his books and I haven't. So given that maybe the translation of this is an out-yet, if somebody wants to start with his fiction, and you sort of see him as a prophet figure, somebody who understands the future before it comes, even though his politics are very, very different than yours, what would be the starting book of his fiction you recommend? So his debut, which I think is translated into English as extension of the main of struggle, that is the best place to start. If you go for later works, I would recommend Serotonin, which also gave him a nostradamus like quality in France because he seemed to predict part of the yellow vest and farmer's protest that shook the country. But once again, it's not just about his perceptions of the contemporary world, but also about. Yes, I think he's a novelist for a world that has become less novelistic. In some cases, even resistant to novelization. And I'm always impressed on how he's still able to give us a rendition of a world that somehow doesn't seem to produce very novel-like characters. And Aniega, thank you very much. Thank you so much. [Music]