Everything Is Politics - But Of What Kind?

 I did not expect a history lesson while reading  Anton Jäger's Everything Is Hyperpolitical: A genealogy of the present. I should have better from the subtitle. Still, its European slant is new to me. I

A sense of breathlessness now runs from top to bottom. The George Floyd protests stood out as the largest protests in American history—thousands of demonstrations, with an estimated attendance of up to 26 million in the U.S. In the summer of 2020, almost one-tenth of the American adult population took to the streets, with both corporate lawyers and unemployed teenagers rioting into the early hours of the morning. Months later, QAnon and anti-lockdown protests assaulted state institutions from Canada to Germany. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Twitter are bursting with political content, from vloggers reciting anarchist pamphlets to right-wing influencers raving about refugees. Issues of consumption, from veganism to climate budgeting, figure prominently across personal lives. Self-help manuals advise citizens to detect and exorcise racial biases. Flags and gender markers proliferate across Instagram and Twitter profiles. A new political sensibility is visible on soccer fields, in popular Netflix shows, in the ways people describe themselves on their social media pages.

Today everything is again political, and fervently so. But despite borderless passions overtaking and remaking some of our most powerful institutions, from art institutes to political parties to supranational bodies, very few people are involved in the sort of organized conflicts of interests that we would once have described, in a classical, twentieth-century sense, as “politics.” Neoliberalism is not being superseded by a renascent social democracy; globalization is not splintering into “deglobalization,” nor is the welfare state returning to its classical postwar form. How should this new period be understood?

I am still chewing over what this genealogy means for America, but I find myself fixated on these paragraphs:

All the critiques of post-politics recognized the separation between “politics” and “policy.” On the one hand, politics named the formation of a collective will that determines what society would do with its surplus materials. Policy, in turn, relied on the execution of that will. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the politics of crisis steadily turned into a crisis of politics, these two moments underwent a mutual estrangement. The determination of the collective will was relegated to a mediasphere addicted to novelty and run by public-relations experts, while the execution of policy was handed over to unelected technocrats. In the widening of this separation lay the seeds of a transition from post-politics to hyperpolitics.

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Across this “populist explosion,” organizational alternatives to the old mass party also began to proliferate. Movements, NGOs, corporations and polling companies with names like Extinction Rebellion and the Brexit Party offered more flexible models than the mass parties of yore, which are now perceived as too sluggish for politicians and citizens alike. The people who would have once been party members can now opt out of enlisting in long-term, involuntary associations, while politicians meet less resistance at party congresses. The continuity with the preceding post-political era was clear. Parties continued to hemorrhage members even as protest activity was on the rise.

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On the policy front, however, the balance sheet of these political forms proved painfully ephemeral. Questions of race, climate, socioeconomic inequality, police violence and health policy remain under-remedied. Except for some trained activists, the participants in the 2020 BLM protests quickly went back to their day jobs with little mark of their participation, save for the black squares that adorned their Instagram profiles. Unlike the 1963 March on Washington—where marchers came wearing jackets adorned with their union buttons and civic labels—most of the George Floyd protesters shared no prior affiliation, membership lists or institutional cadre, with only a few, foggily funded NGOs as stewards. Perhaps this is why, despite being targeted by the largest protests in American history, virtually all the police-department budget cuts in late 2020 were reversed soon after. (Now they were notionally summoned to suppress a post-COVID crime wave.)

Such phantom effects are not limited to the left. On the right too, “movements” from the Tea Party to Trumpism to QAnon rise, proliferate and disperse with unnerving rapidity. Rather than concrete results or new social relations, this political tendency seems to mark its influence by its ability to reproduce its frenetic form of activity, something it has had special success doing at nonprofits, in the media and in an increasingly digital public sphere—not to mention in the minds of those who consume these cultural products. Hyperpolitics comes and goes, like a neutron bomb that shakes the people in the frame but leaves all the infrastructure intact—an awkward synonym rather than an antonym to post-politics.

The fervency for action I can see here and now. Just as I sense a feeling that politics does not result in any policies helping normal people. I suspect here may be the explanation how a radical like Trump, a man without any ideology other than feathering his own nest, can be described by his cohorts and followers as a conservative without his promoters breaking down in laughter.

 

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