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........