What ‘Hyperpolitics’ Explains About This Era

The Ezra Klein Show

This episode of The Ezra Klein Show explores the concept of 'hyperpolitics'—a term coined by historian Anton Jäger to describe an era marked

Key takeaways

• Hyperpolitics describes a phenomenon where political activity is extremely high but not anchored by strong institutions like unions or parties.
• The lack of institutional attachment leads to short-termism, with movements gaining rapid momentum but fading just as quickly.

Main topics

• Hyperpolitics as a framework for understanding modern political volatility
• The decline of traditional institutions like unions and parties

Notable quotes

"We see an increase in political activity on a variety of metrics... but that increase is not matched by an increasing institutional strength."

Conclusion

Hyperpolitics offers a compelling lens for understanding why today's political movements feel so intense yet fleeting. While digital

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) Hey, friends and fellow students. Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election. You can register or get tailored support at votefromabroad.org. Look, state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second. Go to votefromabroad.org now and find your state. Once requested, your ballot will come by email. All you got to do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. Speaker 1 (0:50) One of the hardest things to do is describe the overall shape, texture, rhythm of a political era. We'll talk about wokeness. Speaker 5 (1:01) Woke one was crazy. Woke Speaker 7 (1:05) one was crazy. Speaker 1 (1:06) We'll talk about Trumpism. Speaker 8 (1:07) I was saved by God to make America great again. Speaker 1 (1:14) But getting at the overall form in which they all take place is really, really difficult. One idea for this that has taken off a bit recently that I've been hearing a lot around me is hyper-politicization. Hyper-politics is a concept from Anton Jaeger. He's a historian and contributing 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, 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 Yeager, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So let's just begin at the beginning. What is hyperpolitics? Speaker 2 (2:28) Hyperpolitics is a concept that describes a change in political culture in the Speaker 4 (2:34) 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 the concept to make sense of a new, confusing political present. Speaker 1 (3:11) 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 deinstitutionalized reality to politics. They're not parts of parties in the way they once were. Unions, 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. Speaker 4 (3:45) That's right. Yes. And of course, the story I'm telling is a historical one and it comes with contrasts. So if you're using these two axes, politicization, as I call it, and 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 to 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 strange scissor 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 incorrect. And as I claim, that also means it... doesn't have as many policy consequences as it used to have. Speaker 3 (4:45) So I don't want to question your definition of your own concept, but Speaker 1 (4:50) one thing I feel like that doesn't quite pick up on, but which is part of why this idea has 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, you know, 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. Speaker 4 (5:28) Yeah, so I think the volatility or the frenzy you're pointing at is a quintessential feature of the phenomenon I'm 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 not, 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, invested 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 a 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 protests in 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 Speaker 3 (6:57) of the book is that you often will gesture at what seems very obvious about this to me, which is that this Speaker 1 (7:05) is digital Speaker 3 (7:05) 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 Speaker 1 (7:20) 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 Speaker 3 (7:29) the politics you're describing, a 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... Speaker 3 (7:42) Politics, which is fundamentally downstream of what we pay attention to, and our attention is fundamentally shaped now by algorithms that care about controversy, that care about newness, that are hunting amorally and constantly for whatever will get a rise out of people. And if you build politics on that completely bizarre superstructure of attention, this is what you get. Speaker 4 (8:10) 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 theories, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years, that assign not just a primary, but as we say, a monocausal 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... 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 through something like Russian bots or bought Facebook ads. There was, of course, during 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 there are protests 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, they'd 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 surpass the digital. And if we reduce everything to the digital, we are only having a conversation about platforms when I think it should be a much broader conversation. I Speaker 3 (10:28) 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. And 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 were making about institutions. Speaker 3 (11:03) 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 the 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 like incredible waves of sentiment, but then not be able to kind of translate it over a long period of time. The Speaker 1 (11:52) sort of tendency to look back on something like two or three or four or five years ago, something recent and think, oh, my God, what were we just doing? Right. Famously, AOC just gave an interview where she said woke one was crazy. Speaker 5 (12:02) I have a. local city councilman that has this saying, woke one was crazy. Speaker 7 (12:11) Woke one was crazy. Okay, that's actually- Speaker 5 (12:13) And I think that what's important is that we have to assess what- Was it? I mean, did the movement go too far Speaker 7 (12:19) with some of those positions? I mean, you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police. Well, you Speaker 5 (12:25) know, I think that- During this time, and especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the overtime 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. Speaker 3 (12:56) 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 lead these institutions communicating with each other through this digital world and thus the institutions end up. in a kind of like the same sort of back and forth, slightly wild oscillation quality. Speaker 4 (13:56) 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 hyper-politics is 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. and 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 their 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 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 the 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. Speaker 3 (16:04) You tell a historical story in the book about these other periods in 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, what it was like to be at least in some of these parties, you know, in this other period that you're describing. Speaker 4 (16:40) 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 ways. 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 was 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 that 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, the Christian Democratic parties had very strong views on, let's say, what happened in the bedroom. Speaker 4 (17:51) 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 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