What ‘Hyperpolitics’ Explains About This Era

0:00Hi, I'm Juliette from New York Times Games, and I'm here talking to fans about our games. You play New York Times games? Yes, every day. There's this little tab down here called Friends, so you can add your friend. That feels new to me. It is. It's nice to have the social aspect. Oh my God, and you have a little bit of time. That's crazy. You can look at spelling bee, wordle, connections. Oh my God, amazing. Love that. I have to get the app. New York Times Games subscribers get full access to all our games and features. Subscribe now at nytimes.com slash games for a special offer. One of the hardest things to do is describe the overall shape, texture, rhythm of a political

1:03era. We'll talk about wokeness. Woke one was crazy. We'll talk about trumpism. I was saved by God to make America great again. Getting at the overall form in which they all take place is really, really difficult. One idea for this is taking off a bit recently that I've been hearing a lot around me is hyper politicization. Hyperpolitics is a concept from Anton Jager. He's a historian and contributor at New York Times opinion. And he's also the author of this book, Hyperpolitics extreme politicization without political consequences. And what he's describing is an era in which politics feels like it is everywhere. The intensity of political opinion and commitment is really, really, really high that things are swinging wildly from one side to the other. But things are not securely attached to political institutions and structures.

2:04And so these powerful periods of intense mobilization don't seem to have lasting consequence. I think it's a really interesting way of trying to get at what is happening behind what we're all feeling. He joins me now. Anton Jager, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So let's just begin at the beginning. What is hyperpolitics? Hyperpolitics is a concept that describes a change in political culture in the West in which we see an increase in political activity on a variety of metrics, whether it's voting, protest, but also political violence. But that increase in political activity is not matched by an increasing institutional strength. So if you look at the indices of union membership, party membership, or other civil society organizations, those have stagnated or have continued to decline.

3:04And that is a situation I think which doesn't really have a proper precedent across the 20th century, maybe also not the 19th. And for that reason, I introduced a concept to make sense of a new, confusing political present. So you're describing a situation in which people and moments feel more political. In some cases, they're doing more political things. You have huge mass protests like in Black Lives Matter, but there is a deinstitutionalized reality to politics. They're not parts of parties in the way they once were union. Civil organizations are in decline. And so they're not civically or institutionally attached. It's this kind of mixture of political activity, absent institutional membership. That's right. Yes. And of course, the story I'm telling is a historical one. it comes with contrast. So if you're using these two axes, politicization, as I call it, an institutionalization, you can get a certain chronology of political forms as well. So I talk about the mass politics of the 20th century,

4:08which could be highly politicized, particularly let's say the 1920s and 1930s, but was also very heavily institutionalized. So it's be politically active, often meant to be an institution. And I contrast it also to the post-politics of the 1990s, of the 2000s, as it's called, in which you had a decline on both of those indices, so low institutionalization and low politicization. And what we're looking at now, indeed, is this strain's scissors shape, namely a lot of collectivity has also become easier, and it's become more necessary to pursue it, but it doesn't really have an institutional form, so it feels very incorrect. And as I claim, that also means it doesn't have as many policy consequences as it used to have. So I don't want to question your definition of your own concept, but one thing I feel like that doesn't quite pick up on, but which is part of why this idea is resonated, is the hyperness of hyperpolitics, this feeling of things rising and falling with incredible rapidity.

5:10It's like one year, you're deep inside Black Lives Matter and wokeness, and then it's like the vibes have shifted to Trump, and then they come all the way back. Nothing seems to last, but everything seems incredibly important. You have a very thoughtful, iconic style here, but I want to get at this kind of frenzied nature of it, which you do describe in the book. Yes, so I think the volatility or the frenzied you're pointing at is a quintessential feature of the phenomenon describing, because what do institutions do with political activity? They stabilize it and they give it longevity over a longer time period. And if you don't have these institutions to tie your political action to, and also not let's say the mechanisms of delegation or representation that come with these institutions, I'd say also maybe discipline, that means that short-termism is the de facto mode of a lot of political action, because you can be enormously interested in invested in one question for a couple of weeks, you follow the media cycle,

6:14but then once, let's say the popularity fades or it doesn't seem as urgent, you move on to the next thing. And there's no institution that's actually there to set the agenda to help you articulate a long-term vision that might unite your politics across all these short-term issues. So the hyper has both a spatial and a temporal side to it, spatial in so far as it can go everywhere and it can gather loads and loads of people. I mean, there are record numbers in terms of turnout, not just in the US, but across the West for protesting the last 10 to 15 years, but it's also hyper in that it doesn't cover a very long time span. Just like a political market, you can invest in a product and then when you see that its value is plunging, you can dump your shares and you can move on to the next issue. One of my critiques of the book is that you often will gesture at what seems very obvious about this to me, which is that this is digital politics, this is online politics, this is algorithmically mediated politics.

7:16About hyperpolitics, it is dynamic, intense and polarizing, yet also ideologically diffuse, visibly modeled on the fluidity of the online world. You don't spend much time in the book describing or theorizing the fluidity of the online world, but I want to spend some time on it here because the politics you're describing of politics I recognize and live through. This just feels like not even what institutions are or are not able to do now, as much as politics, which is fundamentally downstream of what we pay attention to, and our attention is fundamentally shaped now by algorithms that care about controversy, that care about newness, that are hunting amorally and constantly for whatever we're going to rise out of people. And if you build politics on that completely bizarre superstructure of attention, this is what you get. I'm broadly in agreement and I don't think it necessarily contradicts or is in friction with the thesis I'm defending.

8:23I'm a bit hesitant about a lot of views, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years, that assign not just the primary, but as we say, a monocosal role to dig into technology, where somehow the internet explains everything, and then the book shouldn't have been called hyperpolitics, but just extremely online politics. And then it's just a book about the digitalization or the increasingly digital nature of our political lives. I want to resist that collapse or I want to resist equating hyperpolitics just with extremely online politics. For the reason that many of the theories we've had, let's say that try to describe the Brexit vote or the Trump vote through something like Russian bots or bought Facebook ads, there was of course during the Arab Spring already a theory that these were so-called Facebook revolutions. There were Facebook revolutions that it was digital platforms that were really driving the upsurge, but also recently the idea that the reason social media is playing this role is primarily because it's the only thing we pay attention to.

9:23And I don't think that's very compelling. For the very reason that you also have to pay attention to the environment in which digital media was launched. And there it's not as if social media did all the work on itself. It's more that the civic or social landscape in which it entered, it found a population that was ready to experience so much of politics online. Of course these algorithms are addictive, but the question is always, why does it stick? Why are people so taken to it? And at the same time, a lot of the reason they are protested doesn't just have to do with hallucinations online. These are very, very real and very important topics, whether it's mass incarceration or police violence in the US, let's say inequality, but surely on the right did say migration. And these are not simply things that digital platforms have somehow conjured up out of nothing. It's more that I think social media is acted as a magnifying glass and an accelerator of certain trends that came before, but which I think surpassed the digital.

10:26And if we reduce everything to the digital, we are only having a conversation about platforms when I think it should be a much broader conversation. I always think of the conversation about what you're calling digital as a conversation about attention. And you can have that conversation well or poorly. And I agree with you dissolving things down to Russian bots or Facebook ads is ridiculous. I didn't believe that in the 2016 election. I don't believe it now. But let me push this a little bit because when I say it's my critique of the book, I don't mean I think you have it wrong in the book. I actually just wish there was a chapter on it in the book. And one thing I was thinking about as I read the argument you're making about institutions is well, what do I see happening with the institutions we have today? Because it's not as if all institutions are gone or nobody is part of a party. You can look at the DSA, which is rising in America and is as a real institutional formation. There are people who devote their lives to the Democratic Party, to their Republican Party.

11:30And one thing I would say about all of these people, not literally every individual, but many of them, is they exhibit the tendencies of hyperpolitics even more than normal people do. The tendency to get overly invested in what gets called online, the current thing, to have incredible waves of sentiment, but then not be able to translate it over a long period of time. The tendency to look back on something like two or three or four or five years ago, something recent, I think, oh my god, what were we just doing? Famously AOC, just given interview where she said, woke one was crazy. I have a local city councilman that has this saying woke one was crazy. The whole point was crazy. And I think that what's important is that we have to assess what it means to do the movement, go too far with some of those positions. You briefly supported the idea of defunding the police.

12:30I think that during this time, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that had that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think what she's describing there is the way online politics led ideas that are real and rooted in the real world to sort of take some forms and be expressed in ways that people no longer wish to defend. And so the way I think there's a connection here is that the people, even who are institutions and the way institutions work and collectivities work, those people are also communicating with each other online and tweeting at each other and we treat, re-tweeting each other.

13:33Donald Trump communicates with the Republican Party through truth social. So sort of saying there are these two spheres, institutions and the digital world. It doesn't feel real to me. I watch people who lead these institutions communicating with each other through this digital world and thus the institutions end up in a kind of like a, like a, the same sort of back and forth, slightly wild oscillation quality. Yes, it's very clear that the types of politicization that are typical of the contemporary world also have an effect on how people affiliate with institutions. There I would say hyperpolitics obviously moves at different speeds in different groups. So with the political professional and the, let's say voter who maybe hasn't voted in a couple of elections and isn't professionally involved in politics. Obviously hyperpolitics going to have very different effects. So the volatility or the short-termism, which we detect in a general population and the relationship to politics, will also find its counterpart even with subjects that find themselves in these institutions, which I think is a striking illustration for AOC, but could make the argument for a couple of other figures as well, is that the reason one can easily rescind certain positions or then step back on commitments that were made quite specifically a couple of times.

14:53Quite specifically a couple of years ago is that there doesn't really seem to be a solid ideology behind many of these political choices and preferences. And this is important for an institutional side of the story. There isn't a sort of program to which you can tie herself. And across the 20th century, I mean, political parties always had leaders or certain charismatic figures that led them forward. They always had people that were more individualized as a member of that party than others. But at the same time, there was a program around which everyone could orient themselves. And this means that changing or reneging on some of those aspects of that program came with costs. And the question with AOC is, well, she has a relationship to the DSA. The DSA is obviously not an official political party, it's a socialist organization. But the question is, what is a DSA's program? She's listening to or she feels she has to be accountable to and how can they discipline her when she then decides that she now wants to pursue a different political path. And I think that's the hyperpolitics at different speeds I'm talking about. In the general population, it's let's say, hopping from one theme to another, but even for political professionals, it means a decline in ideological consistency or even the question of what is my party line or what is my long term vision for the transformation?

16:07You tell a historical story in the book about these other periods and politics, and maybe it's worth sitting in one of them for a few minutes, which is practically mass membership politics. And I think you're more describing European political parties in this than American political parties, which have always been somewhat different. But it's such a different world to try to mentally inhabit, if you're an American in the year 2026, that I like to sort of draw that picture, that what it was like to be at least in some of these parties in this other period that you're describing. So the portrait I'm painting is very much reliant on cases on the left, but I also want to highlight that it's not exclusive to the left. There are right wing variants of this. But the case was that to be a member of a political party was not something optional and was often something that was handed down in families. So it was hereditary in many cases, describing it as voluntary is almost tricky insofar as the social stigma for leaving a party or for not voting for it would be quite severe.

17:18You might have to move out of your neighborhood. And at the same time, it also meant that your electoral choice, which very much a function of your institutional membership. There is no question who you were going to vote for because you were ready a member. And this means that your political preferences were completely determined by the affiliation. And that obviously also meant that the party had a lot of control over your private lives as well. So there are cases in the 1970s, for example, that members of the French Communist Party were not allowed to buy certain cars or drive them. Of course, Christian democratic parties had very strong views on, let's say, what happened in the bedroom. And it was a very authoritarian world in many cases as well. I don't want to pretend as if it was egalitarian as if people had complete control over these parties. But membership was immersive. It was sometime something that could last a lifetime and for which the exit costs were quite high. Now, of course, the US is very different because the US never developed mass parties in the way that Europe did that probably had to do with the fact that the US democratized very early.

18:23At the same time, I want to resist the idea that American parties haven't been profoundly transformed in the last 50 to 60 years, the period I'm covering. Because even as parties that are more part of the state than of society, they still had this hinterland of civil society organizations, particularly in the case of the Democratic Party, for example, unions or different minority group interests. The Black Church would be a good example of this, I think. Yes. And of course, religious institutions are massive, massive, and important and have been for both parties for a while now. But even as that hinterland has started to shrink or desiccate, that also meant that even American parties that are not mass parties have reconfigured their relationship to society as a whole. And they now fulfill a very, very different function than they did across the 20th century. Of course, as I say, it is a different story because there never was the membership model as we knew it in Europe. And this means that the story of hyperpolitics American style has to be told differently than the European variant.

19:26One of the things that I thought about reading that part of the book and you're signaling it here is that I think at a high gloss, that sounds good to people. Right. This idea that we have hollow political parties now and everything just moves too fast. You can't stretch ideology over an actual structure of civic belonging and civic membership and civic action. But these much more totalizing parties that you describe it led to a lot of horror among other things. And you sort of gestured the parties of the right, fascist parties, the Nazis. That it is the case that ideology could bring you into a much more immersive world where the cost of exit was much higher. And the pressure for total ideological indoctrination was more constant. So is this a thing to look back on with nostalgia? I mean indoctrination is not a concept. I think we look back on with a lot of fondness and having a party sit there and tell me how I should look at everything.

20:34And be able to socially or possibly professionally in patronage models punish me if I don't look at it that way. That's not a world I'm so eager to live in either. No. So I talked about the inagilitarian aspects of that system. The book also wants to maintain a focused ambiguity without too much nostalgia about what this world was, how unpleasant it could be for certain people. It starts of course with portraits of figures in the 90s and 2000s or happy to be liberated from that world. We also experience a degree of individual freedom precisely because those institutions don't dominate their lives anymore. And also with the idea that one cannot clone a dinosaur so we cannot take the DNA of those parties and implement them in the present and hope that they will revive and survive the current environment. At the same time it is also very clear that there is a question of power there. People don't simply join institutions because they don't want to be lonely.

21:34That's also a reason and I think it's part of the story that the book also tells in the crisis of sociability. The loneliness epidemic as it's called is obviously also a part of the deinstitutionalization the book is trying to analyze. But except for the sociability element parties are also guarantees of collective power. I mean their instruments for collective action. And as they have declined and as sometimes they're immersive or totalitarian aspects have disappeared. There has also been an increasing difficulty of translating individual preferences into collective action. Particularly in the West I think there are a few exceptions to this maybe China and India that do have these weird mass parties left before the rest. The decline of parties has gone hand in hand with inability or declining gradient of popular power particularly from below. Can you expand on that? That's the thing people sometimes say in the move very fast. Defend that position for me that somebody sitting around in American politics in 1973 or 1954 was more capable of translating individual politics into collective power into governmental reform.

22:42Well there is political science research about this so obviously about the negative correlation for example between public preferences and policy results. So I mean the typical case for example is better care for all where there has been a majority for now for a while but the chance of it getting implemented. But this is a very weak example. Different states I've covered these fights. Medicare for all you pull it it pulls high you then tell people here's what the taxes will be your insurance is going away it pulls low. And it's a very common thing with you know complex policy you can frame it at the outset and people like great and it's a gigantic change and they are very very afraid when you begin actually putting the change on them. So in this comparative take you're making like I want to hear this defended that we were so much better at getting what we wanted politically in another era. I found a lot of the political science on this one I do read a little bit confused so that's why I'm I'm pushing this point before we just skate by it. Yeah it's also important to keep in mind that this is not the only factor feeding into this capacity there is a question of state capacity there are other kind of channels that need to be examined there is just one element namely how is the decline of these institutions negatively affected the capacity for policy change.

23:56And I do think if you look at the heyday let's say what is called the new deal order in the 1930s in the 1940s when the American welfare state which was never as spectacular as the European variant was built. There is a very clear correlation with mass power there at the time and it is also very very clear that after McCarthyism and particularly after the subduing of the civil rights movement. The fall of this mass power goes hand in hand with the difficulty of actually getting concessions particularly for an America's business class. Now in Europe it's different but it's also very clear that for example Europe's welfare states were not just built by technocrats but were built through the exercise of mass pressure. Now once again mass pressure is not intrinsic good it can have very negative consequences but at the same time to me very very clearly is a case that the set of social rights that were built up in Europe and US in the middle of the century were also a function of mass power not only a function of mass power.

24:56I mean it seems indisputable to me that the decline of union power in the US probably has something to do with the staggering levels of inequality that the US currently has. Now it's a correlation and then the causal mechanism is complicated but I think that's one illustration of how institutional power can translate into policy results more concretely. One of the reasons I'm pushing on this is that I think there is a widespread view and I think this view is correct that people feel particularly powerless over politics right now. And so then like the next step in thinking about that view is whether it is a perception or whether it is true. And you know I would tell the story you just told a little bit differently right you have an American political system that is very resistant to kinds of reform for very very long periods of time. The great depression fractures the system it functionally annihilates the Republican Party for a period of time. FDR does not pass all that policy because all of a sudden union density jumps FDR passes all that policy because there is a level of democratic dominance over Congress that is unimaginable to us today.

26:07Lyndon Johnson's great society where you have another big period of expansion of the welfare state comes after Kennedy is assassinated Kennedy is not getting things done. The civil rights movement is stymied for a very long time by a southern power over Congress the filibuster is used basically exclusively to stop civil rights bills for decades and American politics. And so you have these sort of punctuated moments when a lot can get done but they tend to come for unusual reasons now I'm not saying mass power is important in that and I do agree with you by the way that union density is a reason we've had inequality rise because I'll be that as you say people can argue over. The reason I bring all this up is that one of the things it does not always seem obviously true to me is that the average person had so much more power in these times like you needed this sort of moment and then like the you know the over the window cracks open and all the sudden a bunch of things happen but it's very very contingent it's not a linear process in which the work you are doing is a citizen day in and day out is feeling it is getting anywhere most of the time.

27:12One of the things going back to attention which I just think is under theorized in politics so much as we do talk about it is that people today they know so much more about the world they know so much more about it so constantly than they could before so you have all of this information and the information is now tuned to be much more arousing emotionally than it was in another time. One of the things that I suspect is it is the mixture of how much you know and how much you are being made to feel at all moments mix and with like the powerlessness that actually is real right the amount of power and individual has and then the amount of institutions you're tied to is low. The creates is feeling that everything is being done without your consent without your control there's no way for you to affect it in America now with the sort of red blue system where you live in a blue state and you know your vote barely matters in national elections you know same thing in very red states right everybody knows how your state is going to go so what does it matter how you vote that.

28:17That I think we always want to put this is a question of individual capacity but is it a question of individual capacity or is it a question of the amount you're being pulled into politics and then your absence of capacity conflict with each other for you. Yes to both with some modifications maybe I'd say so for the first I think that individual powerlessness is also not completely without president so the heyday of mass politics in for example the 30s and 40s maybe a bit in the 50s was also the state. So the start of the nuclear race which it many people seemed as the supreme expression of powerlessness in the 20th century is the most anti-democratic weapon as George Orwell said so it's not as if that wasn't with us before and I also don't want to pretend as if reinstitutionalization or rebuilding those institutions today will automatically mean that they it will become easier to implement certain policies because there's also a question of where power has moved even on the level of the state.

29:17So in the 60s let's say unelected bodies both in Europe and the US like central banks had as much power as they do today and they're not let's say subject to popular pressure or even electoral pressure in the same way so there's no immediate guarantee and it's one factor among many so you do I think have to have certain coalitions within the elite together with mass power to get some of these policy results done and it could also be that the constellation is favorable and then it turns out that it works. So it's important factors in the policy blockage we're witnessing across both sides of the Atlantic in the last 20 years is that the factor of mass power has been severely reduced even as politicization has risen and that probably explains why it's become more difficult when it comes to the paradox of increasing visibility or the dynamics of contemporary political mobilization I fully agree I mean the kinds of footage you can now get beamed onto your smartphone screen.

30:47It's something of helplessness.

31:47So I think it's something that's really important to me is to create an answer to the question it poses you have seen something terrible in front of you and what you can do is post or comment or like and I do think it creates this somewhat confusion between action and and effect it's an action that may not have an effect but it does sort of complete an instant stress cycle you've just seen something terrible wave to do something well in the place you're going to do something. So you're in what you do is post and again one reason that I focus here is that I think this is true for political elites and for anything else and I think one of the unusual things about this whole story we're in is that the elites are more adult than anyone else's. We go back to Walter Lippmann's book public opinion which I think comes out in 1922 if I'm not wrong right around there and Walter Lippmann's answer to the reality that the world outside our heads differs from the world inside our heads that our pictures of reality are always flawed.

32:50So how do we engage with this world that we don't really understand is this famously quite unsatisfying well there should be these technocratic elite panels and they know everything. And one of the ways that that ends up being an obviously wrong answer is it assumed the elites would not be adult but in fact nobody is more brain out of right now by social media than Donald Trump or Elon Musk you know then the top people in the White House that there is such a that nobody is more attentionally hooked on this kind of information then the people have made politics their life's work. And that just creates a strange thing because you know normal people will then sort of turn to people who are engaged in politics all the time for cues on what to do and how to feel and where to join and not always but often they're the worst people to ask or to follow because they're the most crazed by these you know by this form of political attention.

33:59Yes, so this is a book that's mainly written from below in some sense of I mean it's not just for the left but it's written from the left and that means it describes the effects of like the declining cost of political expression through the online. So as you say you're faced with an obvious wrong or a moral scandal and before you maybe had to write a newspaper editor you had to let's take contact your local party chief or you had to go and stand in the middle of the of a square and start shouting now you can do something else you can express yourself politically much more cheaply and easily then before but then there's a question of diminishing returns as well like it's easy but what are the actual effects. Now that is a question of how the declining cost of political expression affects popular capacity for social change when you look at it from the top of society we can see as you say that there's also variant of hyperpolitics there I think the motives of government of the second Trump administration it's short termism it's incapacity to plan it's unwillingness to plan also indicates that deinstitutionalization or in coherence between different factions of the world.

35:10So the elite has also had severe consequences that say for the people who are actually in charge I mean there's a really spectacular example of this of Elon Musk being interviewed by the editor of the economist recently and I mean it gets very brutal. But do you see why this makes people think that this man who has always power he's the world's richest man he thinks he has a right to influence our politics it makes people it's why you know we started this conversation saying superlatives it's why people love you. I mean some people do love you yes some people do. But do you understand why do you think what you're doing is helpful for Western democracy maybe some people do love me and that's probably true I don't care. But the fact that as you pointed out a quarter billion people follow me is that I think a lot more people actually like me than don't. And I think a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize. When he openly insults her also afterwards on his own private platform but the striking thing about the interview is that these are two members of the same class.

36:17They're shouting at each other in the middle of the public sphere. Normally in a different situation you'd expect some class solidarity from both sides and they were in this together we have to think about a common project. And the elite is severely divided particularly in the US but also in Europe and they don't actually have institutions to reconcile their social sectoral geographic interests. And what the online world does is that it I think aggravates the dispolarization to such an extent that they cannot think long term about what their interests are. So hyperpolitics I think has compounding and very severe consequences for the elite as well. It's just that the book doesn't provide a full theoretical model of how you should probe these effects. I want to come back to that in a second as you did write a very interesting piece in the new left review that is more in this direction and thinking about Donald Trump. But but quickly because as you say the book is written from within the left something you said they're pinged for me which is the would expect a kind of class solidarity between Elon Musk and the editor of the economist can ask why you would expect that because when I look back on past interviews you have huge divisions between you know the elites of different countries at all times.

37:32I mean Musk is a highly right wing American elite who is highly politicized himself is not just a you know random CEO at this point the press is often very antagonistic. You know I think about say like the Buckley the doll debates where they're threatening to punch each other in the face you know on live television. Yeah. It's probably a crypto net. Let's stop calling me a god damn face that you stay plastered gentlemen. Let's tell me about your intuition that there is an absence now of elite class solidarity when in the past that existed because I know my creative history you think about my cartheism right where they're getting each other like destroyed from public life you know on assumption being a communist weapon on its true that elite politics is often been very rival risk and that assumptions of solidarity have never held at any for any great number of them. So I have to confess that this is a manifestation of a vulgar Marxism that's probably working in me where I see two creatures that should have the same class instinct and should be naturally sympathetic to each other but as you say actually elite division or elite rivalry is the rule rather than the exception across history particularly in the US because the country so large you have all kinds of things that are going to be different.

38:59You have all kinds of economic sectors very difficult to unite each faction of the elite into one organization the only periods in American history and I say also in European history and more broadly on a global scale that you do have elite unity and solidarity is when there's a working class threat on the other side so when it comes to anti communism or. Quilching the labor movement under Reagan that is really the last time you had a concerted employer offensive but once that opponent is severely weakened and fractures you immediately have elite factionism showing up so yes you're right they should not like each other or they're not destined to like each other still I think it's striking because it is violence within a specific class and it should not be confused for the type of. Radical polarization that we've often been taught to think about in the last ten years where some have societies highly polarized I think a lot of recent politics can be more explained through elite polarization rather than social polarization as a whole that still I mean a different discussion this I wrote a book on polarization couple years back and this is actually the argument of the book that the elites are polarizing and then they're giving the public much more polarized choices which is polarizing the public in turn and it creates a kind of flywheel and I think that's very true.

40:16I want to go back to this piece we did in the new left review where which is more focused on Trump and Trump's second term and you quote the political scientist Ivan Krastev who writes that the essence of the Trumpian revolution is the implosion of time itself. Tell me a bit about that idea. Well I mean it's a fascinating piece which he wrote for the financial times it's a bit speculative so it's trying to make a couple of observations about Trump's mode of rule which I mean anyone who's turned on the television or logged on to the social media platforms is probably got the taste of in the last two years and it is obviously I think very different from previous American presidents but there's one thing that really stands out and that is a short term or the fact that there's no thinking beyond the 24 hours. New cycle in fact a lot of political decisions seem to be informed by the presumed effects those decisions will have on a media cycle and on its perceived popularity that doesn't mean there isn't a court around Trump that feeds ideas into the machine so obviously there are different ideological factions whether it's Rubio.

41:24It's Kobe that have certain plans on how to reestablish American a jamming the new century but it seems that what Trump does is that he takes the suggestions and then he evaluates them on their efficacy in terms of media effects will this keep me in the news for the next 24 hours if I bomb this country or if I do this and then afterwards for the next 48 hours will come up with a different plan and I thought it's a very. Illuminating observation because it deep personalizes Trump to some extent as the symptom of a wider malaise that can also be institutionally explained it's because everyone's so personally dependent on his caprisis and because the GOP despite some theories is not a mass party it's still a small camera or a small click that is very strongly attached to the state that probably also explains why the administration cannot. Think a week in ahead or two weeks ahead I mean it's a striking contrast with a Chinese Communist Party that is still formulating five year plans or five year designs and a Trump admin that I think can revise a decision during I mean one day yeah you have this line in there that what if short term is a misstructural now and I've been thinking about that line because I do think there is this constant question around.

42:52Trump and Trump is a whether or not with him you're looking at a very idiosyncratic psychology that is highly tuned to the particular moment I've often described him as a like a human engagement algorithm and he really reflects to me the way Twitter thinks and the way X or true social whatever it is feel. The people around him don't necessarily you know I got a lot of critiques to make of a JD Vance a Marco Rubio a Stephen Miller they're not actually short term thinkers all of them consider things on a longer time frame thinking a more to other political elites recognizably ideological way Joe Biden was is pretty end of his administration one of the things that his defenders were saying was it is plans for measure decades but unfortunately elections happen in you know mere years. And so there's a question of whether what Trump is is a kind of harbinger of what is coming or what is really going on the short term is him you know for reasons of both the institutionalization and maybe online algorithms and other things is coming and he's like a two

44:06tuning fork for the future or not but I do look at a place like the UK and they're like running through prime ministers it incredible clip like there is a kind of volatility out there that is not affecting China the same way. And so yeah I guess I'd like to hear you talk more about to what degree you think this is short term is a miss structural to what degree you think the Trump is in that you're describing there is distinctive to a kind of person is a simply an adjustment period in a kind of a new formation of technology how do you see that. Yeah I mean it's a loaded metaphor but I think some door winnie and reading in that you have the species and they have the environment and the environment is obviously changed that it's the structural story we're telling but there does seem to be one species or one particular example of that species that really flourishes in this new environment and that's. Trump and I do think there is a personal dimension to it I mean he himself went through the transition of different media regimes he was the man of television the kind of show man of reality TV the 80s 90s and 2000s and then he I think handily transition or moved into the air of the algorithm and social media but it's very clear that in the case of Rubio and Vance the ideology is actually a burden and it's precisely because Trump is unburdened by any ideological convictions.

45:30This doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't believe anything it's more that ideology as a kind of cognitive frame that filters your decisions is not something that he's very familiar with he has other concerns that come first and that probably also allows him to be such a sermon and that's why he was able to win those two elections and I think someone like Vance who you can sense is opportunistic but is more invested in the idea of ideology once the right books in which he talks about his conversions and expose or sorry expound. I'm not sure that his pitch to the contemporary media adult volatile voter will be as convincing as that of the show man himself and it's very clear that some politicians also in Europe have tried to ape that Trump in style it's it's hard I mean there is a there's a certain skill or even artisanal quality to how he does it which once again is a question of structure and agency at the same time. Trump himself is an usual case but maga maga as a kind of broader movement that for many of its people you can really live in it really does have ideas increasingly it has institutions that are associated with it and leaders who are associated with it you can live in its world it can give you a sort of meaning it has rallies it has in some ways it seems very much more like past errors of politics do than anything we've seen more recently.

46:56So from your perspective is maga hyper politics is it the coming of something new how do you see what is happening there on the American right. I think it's an interesting and complicated question because the first Trump term in the second term term are obviously very different and I do think the second term term is much more institutionalized I mean for the first election victory he himself and his entourage were surprised that even one that was in the case second term. Second time around the Heritage Foundation project 25 that indicated they were better prepared and that there was a project of institutionalization which they consciously pursued the question whether maga is a mass movement and whether they manage to reinvent I'd say even certain forms of 20th century far right mass politics which I think is also related to the so called F question debate whether Trump is a fascist or not. I think yes the second Trump term is different from the first there has been a weaponization for example of parts of the security stages eyes there has been an attempt to create a solid base of supporters that will remain with them also through the fact that there's no all kinds of state funding involved and of course these kind of paramilitary organizations do resemble the 20th century.

48:17Squads that we usually associate with fascist politics at the same time the question always remains whether there will be a trumpism without Trump there's maybe a question whether Tucker Carlson or Margie Taylor green and some of the first trumpers now see themselves as carrying that movement forwards also by dissenting from certain types of GOP orthodoxy I'm just less convinced that they have the institutional structure except for a couple of podcasts and meet. And also the question is if you have a lot of podcasts and media channels to keep that going so that is obviously an open question will see what happens but the GOP has not transformed itself into a mass membership party the buying of a lot of the agents of eyes does seem to be heavily reliant not on their ideological agreement but more on their financial opportunities they have in joining the security state and when they lose the midterms and we'll see obviously what happens with the next election and we're going to be able to see what happens. I'm just not sure that it will persist for such a long time that could of course be another mass movement that goes further and radicalizes it but I don't think that's the same as a party throughout the 20th century that could buy its time across cycles of 5 to 10 to even 20 years and then strike when mag I think is so beholden to these contemporary media cycles that are very short and very volatile that it could yeah as easily rises it could fall.

49:46Recently we asked about how you share your New York Times account and you had a lot to say about New York Times games. I need my own New York Times login because my sister is so much worse at the crossword than I am. I discovered that he's already finished connections that day and I'm like Jonah it was my day. It doesn't let us play the same games as each other. I play the stoku. I do the crossword. I do the spelling bee. I do the word all. Please help. My kids want to be able to play word all but with the word all but we would love to be able to have our own puzzles. I love New York Times games. I want to be able to play my own games. Listeners we heard you. It's why we created the New York Times games family subscription. One subscription up to four separate logins and your existing stats and streaks come with you. Find out more at nytimes.com slash family.

50:47One thing that we've been talking about here is the way institutions but we've I think primarily been talking about civic institutions have eroded. I think there's another question which is about the way that the institutions of governance and power have ossified. And this maybe goes back to what you were saying earlier about the ways in which a system might have become more resistant. Not in this case to me just to individual power but almost to any form of power which is to say that in America where you know we have a much more closely divided politics where it's less like you're less likely to get bipartisan compromise. You get more filibusters your ability to pass big bills has gone down over time and that is true. Even when power is arranged behind the bills. I remember for Barack Obama you were the chamber of commerce and the AFLCIO both supporting an infrastructure bill. There was a lot of power behind immigration bills in that era they went nowhere right because you could kill so much more in Congress.

51:52There are so many more ways to wrap things up so much more you can do in the courts. In Europe it's a situation I know less well but certainly there is a broad sense that the European Union has created more slowness more powers that are acting upon you from far away. And I wonder if some of the movement of political energy to spaces of discourse of posting of things that on the one hand or low effort but at least some kind of answer comes back to you quickly. I wonder if it reflects to some degree a disillusionment with what you can get done in institutions that are now very hard to get anything done in just you know they've been around a long time they're balancing out a lot of different interests people know how to work them better. Money can talk very loudly but I actually always think it doesn't talk as loudly as people think it does because I've watched a lot of money fail to get its way in American politics and elsewhere.

52:58It's just so much easier to block anything than to achieve anything that almost people don't believe in achievements. I think I mean George Shores is of course a spectacular example of someone who's been spraying millions at certain causes and if you look at where the world is headed politically it's not very clear that he has the total control which some conspiracy thinkers attribute to him. I think yes it is absolutely true that even on the level of the elite so there's been a complete legalization of let's say outside elections spending also in the US it's also become easier in Europe but it's not very clear that this increasing lobbying power actually is not a good example. The power actually also makes it easier to achieve your policy aims and that I mean that is a paradox right because you could say okay social change is become impossible from below but if you say also from above it's become very difficult to pursue there's much more profound puzzle to be examined there. I think there is there is a question about the story of the institutionalization as affecting society but also affecting the state.

54:08Because what the adjustments in the 80s and 90s a story that's often told us neoliberalism but which I think goes much deeper is that it on the one hand entails a concerted attack on certain institutions which are seen as hampering economic recovery particularly unions which are blamed for inflation and thereby you have to get rid of them to basically restore economic normality. But on the level of the state there's also a concerted displacement towards unelected non-electural bodies also to keep them shielded from certain elite pressure groups say a central bank has to govern in the interest of everyone and thereby they shouldn't be meddled with but what's interesting is that that does two things it did moves power to institutions that are not open to pressure whether it's elite or popular pressure obviously it's still easier for the elite to get access. But not as easy as as many people think it is and at the same time it increases the attractiveness of the veto option you're describing.

55:08So if we could not get certain things through these institutions what we have to do is just build a kill switch or create something that at least makes it possible to stop something if we don't want it going through. And that also I think becomes attractive from the lower half of society. I do think that just eliminating these veto capacities is not going to solve the problem either because the problem is much more structural insofar as the attractiveness of the veto is a function of an institutional issue that's older and if you want to make the contrast with China. Chinese state capacity means very level without the Chinese Communist Party that's not just a state that's an institution that plays I mean a very strange role in your nighting classes but also different factions of the elite. I don't see an American equivalent of the CCP let alone a European equivalent that could play that role. I think China is such an interesting counter example here I don't ever pretend to know the structure of Chinese public opinion.

56:09But across a number of measures that people do look at and I do think we feel like we have some confidence and there is more optimism and sense of agency around things like AI and China than in America less pessimism. And you know China is a place where as an individual you really don't have same governance. There's very little you can do to affect what the top levels of the CCP are going to do. On the other hand somebody is doing something constantly and change is happening and movement is happening. And even if you are not the one acting upon the world the world is there to be acted upon. I am not I would not want to live under that system. I am not lauding it in that respect. But I do think it sits now as a kind of counter example to a lot of Western systems where it almost has created this choice of do you want rights and inaction or few rights and action.

57:12Trump is interesting from this perspective to me because he comes into office and is able to make a very big show of cracking the system it appears in half. And doing things which people thought couldn't be done he signs all these executive orders including one ending birthright citizenship and throws him out into the crowd and it looks like a WWE rally mixed with a governance function. But it turns out he has not cracked the code. He is passing less legislation than other presidents many of his things end up turned back in courts doge moves with incredible force and speed for a little while and then collapses entirely. He seems overwhelmed by events he's in an Iran war he has no control over. And so you know Trump had maybe an intentional answer he was able to create the spectacle of things happening. But then you're a member of the public and what has really happened that is different now for you or your prices lower does America seem like it is doing better is anybody really in control in the answer again is no.

58:18And now it's almost like falling sleep at meetings and they're going to lose the midterms and so that sense of nobody is I am not in control but nor is anybody else persists. And I think you have this dilemma right now of a west that seems in a kind of political drift often dangerous one. But it is not like the liberal forces in the west have mastered the system either. China is moving very fast and I think it's a kind of pressure on the west to move faster but it's not really clear out of respond to it. And I just wonder about the politics I create on both sides the politics of action there but without much individual agency the politics of individual agency here but without much ultimate promise of action. Yes I mean I'd be careful to say there's no such thing as input legitimacy in China either. So there is obviously not the electoral system that exists in the west but it's very clear that for example protests around COVID did have an effect on how let's say the Chinese leadership refigured its its policies and there is a kind of distinction one can make between input and output legitimacy where

59:34parts of the west have seen an increase in input legitimacy there's increasing turnout in elections when it comes to output legitimacy which a Chinese state is so spectacularly good at it's not very clear that that's happening to me the question is whether the discussion about state capacity or the discussion about getting some of these policy packages through can be linked not just to discussion about what the state can do but rather what institutions are necessary for it. Because as you say the institutionalization also makes it harder for elites to plan and Europe is I mean a striking instance of this where in the face of let's say Chinese competition but also like the Trumpian onslaught of tariffs the geopolitical rivalry they're currently embroiled in European elites are simply not coming up with an answer at all I mean there are a couple of plans that are floating around but it's not as if there's an articulated plan and for example if you're not going to be able to do that you're going to be able to do that. And for that you need some kind of institutional infrastructure to basically unite these different factions and make sure that your relaunches itself into the 2020s.

1:00:42But it's strange because you're put into a position particularly as someone like me coming from the left worry kind of have to help elite save themselves I say like please get your act together and find some kind of organ that concordinate between all the different factions of you. And I mean pointing out elite failure in itself is not a policy but that's mostly what let's say commentary on European politics has become in the last 10 years. One of the ways you're telling a story is you have mass politics and that goes to the sort of more post politics like the calmer political period of the 90s you know your Bill Clinton's your Tony Blair's not everything is political we're at the end of history everybody can calm down now communism is fallen. That thing gives way to the period after the financial crisis you know anti politics occupied Wall Street the Tea Party political movements are rising but that fundamentally hate the idea of political institutions that are not trying to in ways that are traditionally recognizable to take them over even build power in the way we normally think about it and then you get hyper politics.

1:01:47And one way of thinking about hyper politics as a period is that it's actually just fundamentally destructive but necessarily so that that institutional story we're telling now is one in which culture institutions, bureaucracies had ossified and is Donald Trump a good answer no he's not a good answer but he demonstrated that somebody with more planning could do something like doge and maybe do it in a way that is constructive that many things that had become ideologically rigid from how we think about trade immigration to China to much more is now opened up you see a kind of rise on the left in American politics with the DSA and mom Donnie and others in that cohort. And there is a dynamism to it and I think the question is whether or not this kind of just ends up in destruction and nihilism because nothing can gain power for long enough to build something that is new and enduring or it's actually in a Darwinian sense to go back to the metaphor you used earlier this is a kind of necessary byproduct of revitalization right you know for Canada for Europe for others that what was there is breaking down.

1:03:04And it is we're in a messy interenium everybody loves quoting the misquotations of Gromshi here you know a time of monsters. Do you come down on one side or another of this that we're going through a cleansing fire versus but it's going through a fire. Well I mean the problem with the time of monsters quote is that it's describing a pre revolutionary situation that was the age which Gromshi himself was living through in Italy I don't think we're in that I don't think we're in a pre pre revolutionary state I do think we need to be honest about this particularly from the left I do think there is something to be said about the revitalization story you're indicating in that Trump at least has the refreshing effect of clarifying or forcing choice he's ended. Some notion of the Tina dogma or the there is no alternative dogma namely that you choose between Pepsi and Coca-Cola at the election booth and in the end it's basically the same product with a couple of tweaks I think he has finished off that perception or that world of politics at the same time you can very clearly see that the increase in election turnout in the US is also a function of the fact that voters see choice.

1:04:17And if you want to shoot Donald Trump for election that means you very clearly see choice because you want to eliminate one side of the choice matrix that presented you in Germany now there's an election in Saxony where they're guessing that there's been a doubling of voter turnout from 2006 let's say from 44% to 77% I don't think that's a crisis of democracy I think there is an economic crisis in Europe but democracy is is doing better and there's a beautiful phrase about political literacy. Namely the sense that people have that the factors in their social lives whether it's their rent the state of their roads the price of the product are partially subject to political decisions politics has an effect in my life it matters and it can change things hyperpolitics has entailed an increase in political literacy to some extent now of course there's a lot of nonsense and let's say crazy theorizing going on online hyperpolitics up quite exalted. It's exhausting and it induces a nostalgia for the 90s and 2000s which I cover in the book as well because people simply don't want to talk about woke with their uncle at the family gathering for example but at the same time I want to make this very clear this book is not rejecting or dismissing hyperpoliticization as somehow reversible or even negative I think it is good that people care about politics.

1:05:43I think we should celebrate the end of post politics the question is more where is hyperpolitics going and can there be such a thing as an institutional formula which extends hyperpolitics beyond mere outrage I think that is a good place to end so I also found a question what are three books you recommend to the audience. There are three books I chose which are a bit miscellaneous in that they belong to different genres the first is the prophet by Isaac Deutsche, a Polish historian who only learned English I think in his early 30s and then wrote one of the greatest biographies of the 20th century it's a three part biography of Leon Trotsky the famous Russian revolutionary it's obviously beloved by Trotsky so it has a sectarian appeal there's a lot of neo-conservative. The derivatives that were brought up on its diet even Tony Blair is said to have read it but I read it when I was in my early 20s and I've recently revisited it also in the form of an audiobook and it is completely enchanting it is an absolute masterpiece not just the per out biography but also political history it also captures a moment in time that feels enormously distant but still very relevant and it is a pleasure to listen to and read in stylistic terms so even if you are

1:07:00a instinctual or aggressive anti-communist I don't think you will you will not like this book. The second book is Cheese by Willem Elshot written in the 1930s this is something much more obscure it's by a Flemish or Belgian author and the story of the book is relatively simple it's about a middle aged man with a family who wants to become rich as a young man. It's about a rich man who wants to become rich as a merchant and start selling a product he hates and never eats namely cheese and fails at doing so and that's the whole plot. And I think it is a beautiful parable particularly in the 21st century for a society in which buying and selling things has become this compulsive almost obligatory have it but we seem to be relatively indifferent to the products we actually are buying and selling. The final one and I'm not sure there is already an English translation of this is some months from my life by the French writer Michel Welbeck so novelist who also plays a very prominent role in the book hyperpolitics he appears as a protagonist in several chapters.

1:08:13It is not a novel but more of a personal memoir of his in which he relates a couple of rather chaotic months in his personal life in which he was asked to start in an erotic movie and call on machine then. Yes, these things happen. And after which he meditates on contemporary questions of sexuality, culture wars, politics but I mean it might be strange but it's a profoundly moving book. You you really take him as a bit of a prophet use the first books title in there I've always met to read some of his books and I haven't. So given that maybe the translation of this is an out yet if somebody want to start with his fiction and you sort of see him as a prophet figure somebody who understands the future before comes even though his politics are very very different than yours. What would be like the starting book of his fiction you recommend. So his debut which I think is translated into English as extension of the main of struggle that is the best place to start.

1:09:21If you go for later works I would recommend serotonin which also gave him a nostradamus like quality in France because he seemed to predict part of the yellow vest and farmers protest that shook the country. But once again it's not just about his perceptions of the contemporary world but also about yes I think he's a novelist for a world that has become less novelistic in some cases even resistant to novelization. And I'm always impressed on how he's still able to to give us a rendition of a world that somehow doesn't seem to produce very novel like characters. And Aniega thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you.