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.
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.”
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.”
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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