Unemployed men sitting in a public square in the Minneapolis “Gateway” district, Minnesota (1937) | Russell Lee / New York Public Library / Public Domain
I have a friend, let’s call him SJ, who is passionate about social justice. He majored in political science and keeps apace with all the latest goings on domestically and abroad. He parlays this knowledge into a dozen or so savvy Instagram stories per day on topics ranging from, to give a recent sample, the US-Israeli bombing of Iran to wealth inequality and the Epstein files. He’s a great hang and is always down to talk politics. But when I invite him to any form of civic assembly, something always seems to come up. “Next time,” he assures me.
SJ is characteristic of what Belgian historian Anton Jäger views as the highly saturated yet institutionally vacant politics of our time. He calls this phenomenon “hyperpolitics” in his manifesto of the same name, out earlier this year with Verso. Running a lean 128 pages, it is the reworked amalgam of essays originally published in magazines such as The Point and New Left Review, and a German-language analog, Hyperpolitik, published in 2023. The book’s project is to demonstrate how Western political tendencies have diverged from what preceded them over the last century and the conditions shaping their current formations.
Jäger’s argument centers on two metrics whose changes he tracks over time. The first, which he calls “politicization,” is measured by individual political acts such as attending a rally or casting a ballot. By analyzing data on protest attendance, strike activity, and voter participation, along with political assassinations and terrorism, he designates different eras as having “high” or “low” politicization. Ditto for the second metric, “institutionalization,” which he assesses using predominantly party and union numbers, but also those of clubs, associations, and churches.
Jäger deploys this data to construct four distinct eras in modern Western political history. The first is the “short twentieth century,” from the start of the Great War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, with its “mass politics” of high politicization and high institutionalization. Then comes the “very long 1990s,” spanning 1989 to 2008, whose end-of-history optimism saw a “postpolitics” of low politicization and low institutionalization. Next we have the 2010s, from the subprime mortgage crisis to COVID-19, characterized by an “antipolitics” of hostility toward elites that for the first time saw a spike in politicization without an accompanying resurgence of institutionalization. Lastly, from the end of global lockdowns to the present, there’s “hyperpolitics,” an intensification of antipolitics where ideologically diffuse opinions abound in short cycles of hype and outrage without institutional follow through.
As Jäger frames it, the public sphere today is politicized to an unprecedented degree with the help of social media. Fast moral judgments are offered on all aspects of our lives, from what we eat and wear to whom we read, watch and listen to, where we live and work, and how we speak. But the extremely online world is capricious, flitting from one cause to the next without the targeted action or programmatic coherence of a mass membership organization. Atomized individuals may vote on election day or show up to a protest, but lack sustained engagement in a group or party. This, Jäger suggests, makes it harder to parlay outrage into political victories.
Jäger offers a number of interlocking explanations for why we’re highly mobilized and poorly organized. His center of conceptual gravity is the market economy and how it’s affected how we think and behave. Citing a remarkable 1975 report from the Trilateral Commission that concluded, “Inflation is the economic disease of democracies,” Jäger illustrates neoliberalism’s long-standing contempt for civic society. What followed is well-known: the Volcker Shock of the 1970s, the union-busting of the 1980s, the welfare reform of the 1990s. These and other policies reduced the working class’s disposable income, resulting in less money for membership dues and less time for civic participation.
Add to the above a problem of motivation. Another antidemocratic strategy of capital, according to Jäger, is to continually “refine personal consumption” so citizens spend more time as private individuals and less time as political actors. In a cogent quote from an unexpected source, he cites liberal commentator Matthew Yglesias’s observation that “sitting at home alone has become a lot less boring.” What used to require going out into the world can now be obtained without leaving your house: We can summon food and even drugs to our doorstep and entertain ourselves with streaming and scrolling from our bed. These ultraconvenient ways to satisfy our needs deter civic engagement, especially when we, who have been taught to fancy ourselves as free-thinking individuals, are asked to submit to that old-fashioned notion of “unity in action.” The ascendance of Independents as the largest US voting bloc attests to this.
Meanwhile, institutional politics itself has become emptied out and commodified. Jäger traces the growing detachment of parties from their base as officials shifted their priorities to retaining the power and privilege of a state functionary. At the same time, former organizers began founding public law groups, think tanks, foundations, political action committees, and other nonprofits, turning away from financially strapped workers for funding and instead courting wealthy individuals who recoup their donations with tax write-offs. These professionalized parties and NGOs have taken the place of mass membership organizations, with career politicians and staff supplanting the rank and file. Removed from their constituents, they pour money into consultants, polling, and focus groups to gauge the electorate, further commodifying the political sphere. Jäger does well to lay this out, but misses an opportunity to connect the dots between corporate capture and declining party membership. Beholden to moneyed interests, parties lose the ability to address issues of class. As a result, people have little incentive to join them: Why bother when they’ve proven themselves incapable of actually improving your life?
Jäger is guilty of a few other oversights, particularly around landmarks of his covered period that clash with his proffered demarcations. The hippie movement, which famously encouraged “dropping out” of society to achieve personal liberation, goes unmentioned but represents a significant break with the “mass politics” era he posits. In fact, his own graph shows institutionalization peaking around 1950 and accelerating in decline after 1970. On the other hand, while discussing the “postpolitical” era, he omits the 2003 demonstrations against the Iraq War, where as many as 15 million people took to the streets in 600 cities around the world in what may have been the largest single-day protest in history. These and other countervailing trends speak to the limitations of periodization. To Jäger’s credit, he frames hyperpolitics as a “tendency” rather than “a totalizing style,” which may in good faith be extrapolated to his view of the others.
Hyperpolitics closes by briefly considering the age-old question of what, if anything, is to be done. Jäger acknowledges the obstacles up front, including that the gig economy has dissolved most workplace bonds. To reinstitutionalize, he suggests looking to everyday life, in the spheres of “social reproduction and care work,” and “at the street or neighborhood level,” where people still make contact and share concerns such as poor nursing home conditions or rising rents. However, even if we manage to reorganize, he’s pessimistic about the prospects of change given that states, with their unelected bureaucrats, judges, and central bankers, are increasingly insulated from popular pressure. He concludes the book with a melancholic admission: “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.”
Even in this worst-case scenario, institutional reengagement remains valuable. Jäger implies that beyond policy prospects, participating in civic society is a vital part of our well-being. Strong parties once provided individuals with a sense of belonging and refuge from the loneliness of modernity. In the midst of a worsening mental health crisis, restoring social bonds takes on an independent importance.
Recognizing this, there are some early signs that people are buying back into institutions. In February, the Democratic Socialists of America surpassed 100,000 members, doubling their numbers from the previous year. On the labor front, US union membership in 2025 reached its highest level in 16 years. Whether this speaks to a broader political reinstitutionalization is another question. While Jäger’s graph only goes up to 2020, other data suggest party and union membership continue to flag across the post-COVID West.
But these aren’t the only institutions that exist. Mutual aid networks have sprung up across the country, including in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where tens of thousands of residents joined rapid-response networks to thwart Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge in the city. This recent example suggests Jäger may be undervaluing protests in their ability to both net concrete wins and lay the groundwork for more formal organizing. It also speaks to the challenge of measuring institutionalization at the sub-national level. Again to his credit, Jäger acknowledges the difficulty of writing “a history of the present.” We can only hope he’ll have to revise it in the future.
