Hyper-Politics

Discussion

John Ganz:

“An era of ‘post-politics’ has clearly ended. Yet instead of a re-emergence of the politics of the twentieth century — complete with a revival of mass parties, unions, and workplace militancy — it is almost as if a step has been skipped. Those that were politicised by the era marked by the Financial Crash will remember when nothing, not even the austerity policies imposed in its wake, could be described as political. Today, everything is politics. And yet, despite people being intensely politicised in all of these dimensions, very few are involved in the kind of organised conflict of interests that we might once have described as politics in the classical, twentieth-century sense. Jäger identifies this variation on the postmodern condition as “hyperpolitics:”

In many ways we can describe this period as a transition from ‘post’ to ‘hyper-politics’, or the re-entry of politics into society. Yet our new ‘hyper-politics’ is also distinct in its specific focus on interpersonal and personal mores, its incessant moralism and incapacity to think through collective dimensions to struggle. In this sense, ‘hyper-politics’ is what happens when ‘post-politics’ ends, but not on terms familiar to us from the twentieth century — the form political conflict takes in the absence of mass politics. Questions of what people own and control are increasingly replaced by questions of who or what people are, replacing the clash of classes with the collaging of identities.

Ultimately, this fragmentation of politics is determined by the ongoing fragmentation of society, brought about by changes in the structures of employment and association: An age of changing employment contracts and growing self-employment does not stimulate long and lasting bonds within organisations. In its place comes a curious combination of the horizontal and the hierarchical, with leaders who manage a loose group of zealots without ever subscribing to a clear party framework…Rather than a mobile ‘mass’, today’s QAnon troops and anti-lockdown protests look like ‘swarms’: a group responding to short and powerful stimuli, driven by charismatic influencers and digital demagogues. Anyone can join a Facebook group with QAnon sympathies; as with all online media, the price of membership is very low, the costs of exit even lower.”

(https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-era-of-ideological-warlords)