The Left Has a Hyperpolitics Problem

A photograph called Love (Hands in Hair) from the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans shows a young woman in red lipstick, eyes closed, a man’s hands on her head, in a nightclub. This image from 1989, which appears on the cover of the historian Anton Jäger’s new book, Hyperpolitics, captured a sort of beginning. The weight of history is over, and the music can sway. That world, Jäger suggests, is both still with us and long gone. The rich democracies—most of his examples come from Western Europe, though he keeps an eye on the United States—still live in a universe of instant, individualized gratifications. But now, thanks to streaming and delivery, they are largely available at home, making even the thumping nightclub itself an object of nostalgia.

Whether it closed in September 2001, March 2003, or September 2008, the era of “post-politics” augured by the fall of the Berlin Wall is long over. By the 2010s, history returned and so did large-scale contentious politics, exploding far beyond the staid boundaries of formal institutions, in wave after wave of protest, copycat protest, and counterprotest. Yet, in a fundamental paradox, after all the mass action, little remained in the way of institutional residue or durable victory. For all the differences between Black Lives Matter and Stop the Steal, Jäger writes—and one might add Occupy Wall Street and Rhodes Must Fall—“these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.” “Incessant yet uncoordinated excitation” makes for a politics that raises hopes only soon to dash them.

The two major factors Jäger sees as shaping the political landscape are, then, the politicization of society and the institutionalization of politics. Our present era of hyperpolitics is simultaneously politicized but not institutionalized. The placid years after 1989 were low on both dimensions. By contrast, the age of mass parties and thick civil society was high on both—a richer and more totalizing associational world, encompassing parties all the way from fascist to conservative to socialist to communist, in times more heroic and tragic than our own benighted present.

Hyperpolitics, Jäger argues, poses a larger problem for the left than for the right. Here the analysis picks up from his previous book, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession, an unsparing account of the left populist revival written with Arthur Borriello. If the right’s most perfervid dreams are yet to be fulfilled, right populism marches forward nonetheless. Whether the right owes its relative success to the last embers of social cohesion that remain in police unions, gun clubs, and the like, or simply finds voters amid social anomie and the aftermath of failed countermobilizations, the left requires what Antonio Gramsci called “a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action,” and that is nowhere to be found. Instead, “the left’s hyperpolitical mobilization detonates like a neutron bomb: a moment ago, thousands of people were protesting in a square—now they have vanished, with the assailed power infrastructure intact.”

The United States, with its fragmented political system and its overheated attention economy, has proved particularly susceptible to hyperpolitics. Belgian-born, U.K.-based Jäger is not the first foreigner to be dazzled by the sheer over the topness of American politics, marveling at “WWE wrestlers and country stars pledging to physically shield their candidate from harm at the RNC” and “Georgia rappers counting down to state announcements at the DNC.” But neither does he treat the election of Donald Trump as an exceptional moment in the country’s history or the anti-democratic features of the American Constitution as a suitable explanation for our present discontents. Besides, hyperpolitics is far from unique to the United States. As his examples show, variations on this same story recur in parliamentary and presidential systems, and with first-past-the-post and proportional electoral systems. Institutional reforms might help, but deep explanations lie elsewhere.

What gives the book its bite is its reading of “Putnam from the left.” In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam traced how the decline of community groups and civic ties in the United States had produced an atomized polity. For Putnam, writing in and of the post-politics era, the story was about civil society itself. He evinced little interest in union decline, neoliberalism, or the changing characteristics of capitalism. Nor, beyond noting falling rates of voter turnout, did he pay much heed to the decline in parties’ presence on the ground. A commission of worthies under Putnam’s leadership, whose most notable member was an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama, offered “150 things you can do to build social capital,” among them “Hold a neighborhood barbecue,” and “Give your park a weatherproof chess/checkers board.”

For Jäger, the loosening of social ties that Putnam identified explains not only declining institutionalization, with the erosion of unions and the disappearance of the thick organizational culture around mass parties, but also just why increased politicization would fail to stick into durable organization, and why that would hurt the left. That is a story not just of the endless scroll of clickable content but also of the “wasteland of sociability”—a void in the place of the associations that had forged political and class consciousness. Jäger quotes the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás’s observation that the “counter-power of working-class trade unions and parties” was undergirded by “their own savings banks, health and pension funds, newspapers, extramural popular academies, workingmen’s clubs, libraries, choirs, brass bands, engagé intellectuals, songs, novels, philosophical treatises, learned journals, pamphlets, well-entrenched local governments, temperance societies—all with their own mores, manners and style.” These social worlds formed political loyalties far thicker and more durable than anything on offer today outside a few religious groups, melding deep commitments with ongoing social and communal ties.

At one level, this is all romantic stuff, a portal into a vanished world. But it’s also a very real entry into contemporary debates. If the cell with high politicization and low institutionalization is bad for left politics, and the crises roiling the rich democracies aren’t going anywhere, then the only way out is back to the high politicization, high institutionalization world of mass politics. Creations of the nineteenth century, the trade union and the mass party reached their apogee in the twentieth and lumber on in the twenty-first. As “power resources,” in the Swedish sociologist Walter Korpi’s phrase, they remain peerless, serving not just as receptacles of social energy but shapers of social struggle. All sorts of nonprofit groups claim to represent the downtrodden, but as anyone who’s ever tried to play power politics from the left can well attest, it’s still unions that have real ties with their members and also the muscle to get things done. And, love it or loathe it, there’s no getting around party politics.

Jäger’s call for institution-building cuts against post-2010 strategies for electoral insurgencies and social movements, which feared that formal structures would sap the grassroots energies that propelled them in the first place. They came to that conclusion from different directions. At one pole lay the horizontalism of Occupy. The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, its guiding spirit, sought “the continual creation and elaboration of new institutions, based on new, non-alienating modes of interaction.” At another pole lay the left populists who emphasized direct connection between leader and people, and admired charismatic figures like Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Yet their differences are more in degree than kind: The anarchists and populists alike had little use for formal institutions in general, or for political parties in particular.

Jäger’s heroic view of parties also stands in contrast with much mainstream political science, which sees parties principally as the vehicles for ambitious politicians or advocates of particular policies. Parties are useful for their limited purposes in holding a ballot line and organizing a legislature but hardly shape adherents’ lives and worldviews. That instrumental approach largely comports with the dominant trends in ever more professionalized contemporary campaigning, obsessed with carefully calibrated messages delivered directly to individual voters. The political consultants are correct that swing voters have the memories of goldfish, but they have forgotten the critical older lesson that hegemony takes time, and see no point in maintaining steady connections with voters.

Is there a way back to a world of thick associations? Hyperpolitics is not a work of strategy, and rightly so, but the biggest unanswered questions concern just what social factions can be organized and how. Left parties can no longer rely on their historic base in the working class and are increasingly aligned with a smaller, better-heeled cohort of highly educated voters (what the economist Thomas Piketty and his co-authors Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano have termed the Brahmin Left). Jäger gestures at but does not really grapple with how to build a winning coalition under these circumstances. Questions of what the contemporary version of the old social democratic stamp club looks like in practice, and what social niche it occupies, are deeply intertwined, and the more vexed for all that. If, as is typical with attempts at social renewal, the choirs and brass bands reach only into the educated base, that fails to solve the fundamental problem. Attempts to circumvent it and go directly to the working class risk the very patronizing condescension, a contemporary version of Marie Antoinette dressing up in peasant garb, that got center-left parties in this mess in the first place. Readers less doctrinaire than Jäger will note that parties can do only so much to shape the electorate, and that to some degree they have to meet voters where they are—not just ideologically but in their willingness to engage in long-standing, thick activity at all. Where voters are these days is mostly on the couch, scrolling through their phones.

In American politics, Hyperpolitics marks the leftward edge of what the political scientist Henry Farrell has termed “partyism,” a very loose tendency that sees robust formal parties, especially at the state and local level, as essential to any serious prospects for democratic revival. For some partyists, the failure of Obama for America to institutionalize itself after the 2008 campaign looms large. Another strand, distantly descended from efforts in the 1960s and ’70s, looks to the kind of deep organizing characteristic of the most effective community groups, such as ISAIAH, a statewide multifaith organizing group in Minnesota. Other partyists emphasize just how unfun politics is now, and want to reengage by just getting people together. The bullet points in one such list, from the writer Ned Resnikoff, mention happy hours, trivia nights, and movie watch parties.

Its practitioners share a family resemblance in their belief that parties past might offer lessons to lead us out of our present discontents. The sky-high turnouts of the late nineteenth century in the North—when more than 80 percent of eligible voters (all men) showed up on Election Day—emerged from top-to-bottom organizing. Parties paid for public spectacle such as torchlight parades to demonstrate their popular appeal. And although the Wide Awake parades in support of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 tend to get viewed more fondly than the party battles of the Gilded Age, the whole approach offers models for mass politics: engage the electorate at scale and in person all year round.

Northern Democrats of the long New Deal era also remain an exemplar of a mass politics that delivered the goods. The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party of Hubert Humphrey’s state and the UAW-led party in Michigan stand out as leading lights of a powerful laborite tradition. State Democratic parties, linked with unions from the old CIO and middle-class grassroots reform activists, backed social programs and, antagonizing the Southern Democrats who dominated Congress, pushed a sometimes-reluctant party toward the policies that would culminate in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Amid all the warm remembrances, one might add just how hard-nosed the old-school party politics was: a matter of getting everyone in line and not just showing up for neighbors. The Brooklyn Democratic leader Meade Esposito, a mentor to both Donald Trump and Shirley Chisholm (American politics can be a very small place), famously kept a baseball bat under his desk.

Partyism, as that history suggests, encompasses plenty of approaches to party that stand in productive tension with what Jäger has in mind. Self-described “new political realists” look to the machines of yore and celebrate their small-minded transactionalism as antidotes to contemporary polarization. Others of a more Tocquevillean bent see parties as schools of citizenship, teaching the democratic lessons of persuading others, recognizing the merits in opposing viewpoints, and accepting losses and moving on. Meanwhile, normie Democrats aplenty want to connect with voters in ways that feel more meaningful than a door knock from a stranger just before Election Day. Whether all these tendencies can together or separately revive the Democratic Party and reach beyond its core college-educated cadres will do much to determine the fate of party and republic.

Jäger can be self-indulgent, more impressive than persuasive as he wallows in his erudition and delights in his aperçus. When he reproduces a long blockquote from Eric Hobsbawm recalling the last legal march of the Communist Party of Germany on January 25, 1933, he conveys ample pathos but is unlikely to win over anyone skeptical of the Communists’ approach. The book moves far, far too quickly, even granted its limited space at barely a hundred pages, with scant attention to qualifiers or counterarguments, still less the messy realm of evidence, whether in election returns or public policies. Too often, others’ conclusions are taken as facts. It has its genesis partly in an essay Jäger wrote for New Left Review, and the characteristic high NLR style amplifies his tendencies toward hyperbole. He brings to mind Daniel Bell’s old self-description that he was “a specialist in generalizations,” which is a double-edged sword.

The boundaries between politics and aesthetics are fuzzy—and, let’s be honest, real political work is mostly unglamorous drudgery, no matter how gorgeous the framed posters may look to us now. The old world of mass politics survives in memory only “when a certain kind of person,” the political theorist Jordan Ecker wrote in a review of The Populist Moment, “reads an NYRB novel about interwar Europe.” The danger is that it’s all a game of signifiers, not a cri de cœur. Don’t we all want to LARP our favorite cult classics?

Still, Hyperpolitics is a book of considerable substance underneath all the sheen. At a time when the various enthusiasms of the 2010s seem faraway indeed, no matter how low Trump’s approval ratings sink, and when Democrats’ sheer desire to win seems to blot out any questions of long-term reorientation of state and society, Jäger stands out for the sweep and force of his analysis. The rich democracies in the 2020s find themselves in a logjam. If it breaks, the waters will not be rushing leftward. Anyone looking for an alternative will have to confront Anton Jäger’s stark conclusion that the left needs “a reinstitutionalization of political engagement,” and that without it “its adversaries will continue to enjoy a decisive advantage.”

Jäger writes very much as a millennial socialist. The 2010s left’s heady moments arrived as youthful exuberance, and the disappointments of the 2020s manifest as generational angst, not just political frustration. Today’s defenders of institutions and the virtues of community typically congregate on the soggy ground of nostalgia for bipartisan—or, more broadly, trans-ideological—comity, however bitter their denunciations of Trumpism. Institutions tamp down conflict, rather than pointing it in a given direction. What gives Hyperpolitics its bracing quality despite all the preening is that Jäger turns that familiar formulation around. With grand ambitions to theorize a left that can win, he rediscovers the radical possibilities in institutional thinking.