#hyperpolitics — Public Fediverse posts

Trump and Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars.

“‘Hyperpolitics’. This is a world where viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish from one to another, rule the public-private spheres.” (Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences. Anton Jäger. Review. Tendance Coatesy)

“What Jäger seeks to understand in Hyperpolitics is the way politics appears to have returned with a vengeance, yet at the same time turned on itself as a form of anti-political rage and hopelessness. He explains this in terms of two key dimensions of democratic health and power: ‘politicisation’ and ‘institutionalisation’. Politicisation is difficult to track empirically, but Jäger gives a broadly convincing history of a downward trend in the West from the First World War through to the 1990s, with countervailing spikes of political energy and mobilisation around 1929 and 1968. In moments like those, politics leaves nothing and nobody alone, neutrality isn’t an option, and the street becomes the primary theatre of democracy.” Easy to Join, Easy to Leave. William Davies. London Review of Books.

Jäger offers an often insightful account of how politics, for and by the masses, is pursued in a ‘hollowed out’ public sphere. But what of the hyper-politics of the rulers Donald Trump is one-man derangement symptom parading, as John Bellamy Foster argued in 2024, on the stage of the US quest for Nuclear Primacy. The “maximalist nuclear strategy, rooted on the assumption that the United States can dominate at all stages of conventional and nuclear escalation and even win a nuclear war…” (The US quest for nuclear primacy: the counterforce doctrine and the ideology of moral asymmetry. Socialist Register. 2024.)

How does Trump fit into this? The new translation of Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius, by Tom Holland offers one historical hyper-political spectacle, “A key element of being a Roman emperor – as for any head of state or government before or since – was acting the role of princeps ‘on the most public of stages’, as Holland puts it. As well as the games and circuses they organised to entertain the masses – many of which Suetonius describes in exhaustive detail – they had to put on a continual performance of their own. ” (Thomas Jones)

Poor old Trump.

OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons

https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-broken-institutions-and-the-need-to-rebuild-the-commons/

OMN: Broken Institutions, and the Need to Rebuild the Commons

https://hamishcampbell.com/omn-broken-institutions-and-the-need-to-rebuild-the-commons/

"In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama claims that the new age of neoliberal consensus he predicted would be “a very sad time,” void of the “daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” that ideological struggle inspires. In the place of these romantic ideals, he believed the new millennium promised only “centuries of boredom,” a restless utopia dissatisfied with its own perfection.

However, this prediction could not have proved further from the truth. Thirty years later, we are living in an era of unprecedented noise and excitement: constantly distracted by viral moments that jostle for our already thinly drawn attention. Within this febrile atmosphere, even the act of critique is hampered. Political theorists have found themselves unable to maintain a coherent context in which to develop their own ideas, as the landscape around them continues to fluctuate and all that is solid melts into air.

In spite of these challenges, Hyperpolitics represents Jäger’s effort to ground our ungrounded moment in a clear genealogy. In this regard, he is successful. And while the outlook is bleak, there are reasons for hope that Jäger could not have predicted when submitting his final copyedits."

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/hyperpolitics-jager-institutions-media-review

#SocialMedia #Neoliberalism #HyperPolitics #Activism #IdentityPolitics

"The eclipse of traditional parties has not led to the withering of political activity, however. On the contrary, it has gone hand in hand with much greater politicization. In this decade, politics seems to be everywhere, all at once. In America, the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were potentially the largest in the country’s history, with some estimates putting the number of participants at over 20 million. Turnout in European and American elections is healthy; protests are recurrent and intense; political violence, including assassination attempts, is making a brutal comeback. On social media, in turn, political discourse has become both omnipresent and diffuse. Clearly, “post-politics” has come to an end.

This effusion often invites comparisons to Gramsci’s time, the high tide of political activism. One fact, however, voids the analogy: Western societies today, unlike during the 1920s and 1930s, are experiencing a continuous erosion of institutional structures. Trade unions, civic associations, social clubs, volunteer networks and churches: All are in abeyance. Both the Jan. 6 riots and the Black Lives Matter protests — to take the two most eye-catching examples of political contestation in America — were large and energetic. But they also proved very short-lasting and birthed neither durable infrastructure nor dues-paying memberships.

The result is a peculiar scissor shape: on the one hand, intense political activity; on the other, continued institutional sclerosis. Where in the 1990s we had parties without politics, we now have politics without parties. This is the strange confluence I have termed hyperpolitics. For traditional political parties, the previous bedrock of Western political stability, it is a lethal tonic.

Nowhere is this more visible than in what some consider the first mass party in Western history: the British Conservative Party."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/07/opinion/political-parties-west-hyperpolitics.html

#Politics #PoliticalParties #Hyperpolitics #PoliticalSociology