Post-Politics
Description
From the Wikipedia:
"Post-politics refers to the critique of the emergence, in the post-Cold War period, of a politics of consensus on a global scale: the dissolution of the Eastern Communist bloc following the collapse of the Berlin Wall instituted a post-ideological consensus based on the acceptance of the capitalist market and the liberal state as the organisational foundations of society. Generated by a cohort of radical philosophers – namely Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek – and their concern with politics as the institution of radical, active equality, this critique claims that the post-ideological politics of consensus has occasioned the systematic foreclosure of the properly political moment: with the institution of a series of new “post-democratic” governmental techniques, politics proper is reduced to social administration. Meanwhile, with the rise of the postmodernist “politics of self” comes a concomitant new “politics of conduct”, in which political values are replaced by moral ones (what Chantal Mouffe terms “politics in the register of morality”)."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-politics)
Discussion
The era of post-politics has ended
Anton Jager:
“The rumour was going around that politics was dead. The advent of a ‘new world order’ was declared. The End of History was nigh … The word ‘struggle’ was discredited as a throwback to Marxism, become an object of ridicule. As for ‘defending rights’, the first that came to mind were those of the consumer.
First published in 2008, Ernaux’s book appeared shortly before Lehmann Brothers went bust. An English translation only came about in 2017, already at the close of the ‘populist’ decade. When it first was published, Ernaux’s work diagnosed a world in which people had retreated into privacy; where politics was relegated to the back burner while technocrats were in charge. Tony Blair simply claimed that opposing globalisation was like opposing the turning of the seasons. ‘We didn’t quite know what was wearing us down the most,’ Ernaux recalls this moment, ‘the media and their opinion polls, who do you trust, their condescending comments, the politicians with their promises to reduce unemployment and plug the hole in the social security budget, or the escalator at the RER station that was always out of order.’
Ten years and a decade of populist turmoil later, Ernaux’s testimony reads both familiar and unfamiliar. The rapid individualisation and decline of collective institutions she diagnosed has not been halted. Barring a few exceptions, political parties have not regained their members. Associations have not seen attendance rise. Churches have not filled their pews, and unions have not grown precipitously. Across the world, civil society is still mired in a deep and protracted crisis.
On the other hand, the mixture of diffidence and apathy so characteristic of Ernaux’s 1990s hardly applies today. Biden was elected on a record turnout; the Brexit referendum was the largest democratic vote in Britain’s history. The Black Lives Matter protests were mass spectacles; many of the world’s biggest corporations took up the mantle of racial justice, adapting their brands to support the cause.
A new form of ‘politics’ is present on the football pitch, in the most popular Netflix shows, in the ways people describe themselves on their social media pages. To many on the right, society now feels overtaken by a permanent Dreyfus Affair, cleaving family dinners, friends’ drinks, and workplace lunches. To many on the centre, it has created a longing for an era before this hyper-politics, ‘a nostalgia for post-history’ in the 1990s and 2000s, when markets and technocrats were exclusively in charge of policy. An era of ‘post-politics’ has clearly ended.”
(https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/01/from-post-politics-to-hyper-politics)
Towards Hyper-Politics
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)