Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences

Historian Jäger (The Populist Moment) offers an incisive analysis of the contemporary political moment, in which “popular involvement in American politics has seen a relative resurgence” and yet “institutional involvement” with organized political groups is at an all time low. Instead of the organized mass-movement politics that characterized the 20th century, Jäger asserts, today’s era is one of “hyperpolitics,” wherein “the primary forms of political engagement” happen on social media and are “as fleeting as a market transaction.” Such interactions are “intense” and “polarizing” yet “require little to no long-term obligation.” Jäger offers a brief survey of how society got here, from the post–Cold War “nihilistic societies of the 1990s and 2000s” to the shocks of the 2008 financial crisis and the ascendancy of Trumpism. Along the way, he highlights the public’s decreasing engagement with traditional social institutions like labor unions, civic groups, and churches, and points to how both major political parties have become increasingly “fused with their media or donor classes,” whose economic interests lie, the author suggests, in promoting exactly such monetizable, market transaction–style political engagement. Indeed, he cannily argues, the erosion of social institutions appears to be “an imperative of capital itself,” as if “collective life had to be thinned out to clear new inroads for the market.” It’s an urgent and clarifying call to log off and show up. (Feb.)