Episode 78: Anton Jäger
On hyperpolitics and the hollowing out of American political institutions
Now that classes are over and the end of the semester is near, we’re back for several weeks of podcastmaxxing. So stay tuned for some great episodes in the coming weeks, dear listeners!
Here to help us understand our current political moment and to diversify David’s reading list is Anton Jäger, a Departmental Lecturer in the History of Political Thought and Political Theory at University College, Oxford. Jäger joins the pod this week to discuss his new book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, where he offers a European’s perspective on the American political moment.
This episode begins with an explanation of what, exactly, hyperpolitics is and how it differs from other, older forms of politics. Jäger suggests that hyperpolitics is characterized by a high degree of political involvement but a corresponding deinstitutionalization of politics. Sam queries whether our current moment might be more continuous with the past, with both characterized by a quiescent politics. And David asks about the degree to which our politics has been causally determined by economic forces. Along the way, we also discuss whether it’s helpful to label the Trump movement as fascist, whether hyperpolitics is the product of liberalism’s failure, and whether the smartphones are really to blame for everything. We hope you enjoy!
Referenced Readings
The Hollow Parties, by Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld
Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam
The Dark Side of Democracy, by Michael Mann
The Project-State and its Rivals, by Charles Maier
A Running List of Nominations for the Canon of American Legal Thought (1975-2025)
A Matter of Interpretation, by Antonin Scalia [Grove]
“A Neo-Federalist View of Article III”, by Akhil Reed Amar [Grove]
“The Anticanon”, by Jamal Greene [Grove]
The Economic Structure of Corporate Law, by Frank Easterbrook and Daniel Fischel [Macey]
On this week’s episode, Jäger offered a European outsider’s take on American politics. Flipping the script, what’s your best outsider’s take on European politics?
Sam: The first wave of right-wing victory is over, and now it is coming for France and Germany. Get ready.
David: I can’t believe that British politics is not full of people with their hair on fire about why the country’s economic growth has been so slow – Poland is likely to catch up in per capita GDP in a few years! And, if anything, de-growther forces, on both the right and left, are rising. It’s like the frogs in slowly boiling water croaking requests to turn up the temperature.
Episode Transcript
[00:00.000] David: This podcast is generously supported by Themis Bar Review. For more information about Themis, check out Themisbar.com. That is T-H-E-M-I-S-B-A-R dot com. Thank you very much, and now back to the show. All right, all right, all right. Welcome to Digging a Hole, the legal theory podcast. On this podcast, my co-host and friend and colleague, Sam Moyn and I, David Schleicher, talk about legal theory and whatever else is in our mind. How you doing, Sam?
[00:50.320] Sam: I’m doing great. It’s the end of term, and we’re finally kind of doing a kind of podcastmaxxing couple of weeks where we do a number of episodes, and I’m looking forward to this one.
[01:03.640] David: I mean, you guys don’t know this, but Sam maxes everything. He’s hitting his jaw with a hammer right now. It’s really something to see. It’s really-
[01:11.340] Sam: I know. A good friend of mine actually did end up in some kind of chat room with Clavicular himself, but I barely know who that is.
[01:22.160] David: I’m thinking next guest.
[01:23.960] Sam: Absolutely. I’m sure he would submit all of his legal theory writings.
[01:29.440] David: A lot of legal theory. I think he has a new book coming out from Oxford Press. Anyway, yeah, no, the end of the semester is terrific. Congratulations to all of our students who are listening, who have finished their classes. Good luck with your exams if this comes out while you still have them. That’s true to all-
[01:49.080] Sam: And papers.
[01:50.080] David: And papers. And all you law students. I’m going to read your papers by the time you hear this. I’m watching you. I’m watching you. So, yeah, no, great. So who do we have on the pod this day?
[02:02.000] Sam: We have Anton Jäger, who is a genuine intellectual, and he’s out with a great new book called Hyperpolitics.
[02:10.000] David: I’m getting hyper just thinking about it. So let’s get jazzed, man. All right, let’s get to it.
[02:22.080] Sam: Okay, well, we’re joined today by Anton Jäger, who is the author of a fantastic new book called Hyperpolitics from Verso. I try to broaden David’s horizons. I think this might be the first Verso book I’ve ever convinced him to survey on this podcast. Anton is a lecturer in politics at the University of Oxford, and he’s a frequent contributor on European politics to the New York Times. And we’re going to hear about this book, which is really like an essay or even more a series of essays. So Anton, thanks for being part of this.
[03:09.120] Jäger: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
[03:12.480] Sam: Well, why don’t you just to start lay out what the hyperpolitics hypo is, and it basically involves the claim that there’s a new form of politics that has succeeded mass politics, and then what you call post politics and anti-politics. So can you just kind of classify those things briefly and explain what hyper politics consists of?
[03:41.800] Jäger: Yes, I’ll first give an introduction to why I wrote the book or what the reasons for this book existing in the first place are. Then I’ll talk a bit about that taxonomy, which is also chronology. Then I might talk a bit about what the book says about what the limits and opportunities of this hyper politics are. So the book really starts with a very basic diagnosis, namely that there’s been a change in political culture, particularly in the West in the last 10 to 15 years. This is a Western story, partly out of ignorance, not because I’m not interested in the global side of it, because that’s the constraint of my range of references. But the question is really what has happened to Western political culture in the last 10 to 15 years, and how should we find precedents and analogies for what it is? And what we see when we look at a variety of quantitative metrics in the last 10 to 15 years is that whether it’s voter turnout, protest, let’s say discursive commitment online, but also even political violence, particularly in the US, we’ve seen a remarkable uptick and rise. So there are estimates that the 2010s are not just a decade of protest, but one of the periods in human history in which humans protested the most. Voter turnout is up even in European elections, which are usually actions that draw very, very little animus and even political violence. If you look at the number of attempts at presidential assassination in the latest rounds, even those are up. And one of the reflexes we’ve seen in response to this re-politicization, as the book calls it, is to look for analogies or comparisons with the 20th century, particularly the interbellum period, so the 1920s and 1930s. So just like we compare Donald Trump to a fascist, we have a tendency to compare our contemporary era to that dark period in Western history. And one of the basic points the book makes is that the analogy breaks down precisely because that politicization axis might be very high nowadays, but a different axis, which is the institutionalization axis, which asks the question, how many people are in civil society organizations, are in unions, are in parties, there we’ve seen a continued decline rather than a rise compared to the 1990s and 2000s. And that is a major difference with that period because in 1930s and 1940s, society could be highly politicized, but that political activity was always strongly institutionalized as well. It always was mediated by certain collective institutions, and that is not the case today. And what the concept hyperpolitics tries to do is basically say this is a new situation and we need a new concept for it. And that obviously immediately gives you a contrast with those other periods you talked about. So mass politics is highly politicized, but also highly institutionalized. The post-politics of the 90s and 2000s is depoliticization plus deinstitutionalization, so low on both axes. Then you have this weird intermediate period in the 2010s, which I call anti-politics, which has an institutional dimension, but it’s already quite politicized. And hyperpolitics, of course, is high in politicization, but low in institutionalization. Let’s say this is the broader, I don’t want to call it a philosophy of history, but the sort of broader chronology, which the book trades in. And then, I mean, the two questions to ask is where did hyperpolitics come from? How should we locate it causally? And then the more normative question is, what are its promises and what are its disappointments? Or what can we get from it? What can we not get from it? And how might we move beyond hyperpolitics into something like a more 21st century version of mass politics? But that is obviously a highly speculative question.
[07:16.080] Sam: And yet we’ll get to it. So just proceeding step by step, let me just start with a possible line of skepticism towards the framework, which I think is brilliant and seductive. Because I basically want to ask, why see re-politicization? I understand that there’s some data to that effect. And then we look elsewhere towards kind of institutions and society to see what isn’t there that was present in the era of mass politics. But it just seems like you could argue for a lot of continuity across recent stages and emphasize the relative quietism of politics even now. I’m not going to deny that some of the upticks that you note are happening. But if you look at American street mobilization, it’s minor. We’re in one of the most quiescent periods in US history. And that would include things that we talk about like BLM or January 6, which are pretty evanescent and honestly, the numbers are not extraordinary. And so I just want to understand, especially since later on you kind of acknowledge that the anti-political phase is very deeply similar to the hyper-political phase, just why we shouldn’t start by kind of questioning whether there has been much re-politicization yet?
[09:06.000] Jäger: Yes, I think this is a very legitimate question because there’s a tendency also to describe what I call hyperpolitics as a form of pseudo-politics. So it looks as a form of re-politicization on the surface, but since there’s so little durability, longevity, and also substance to it, there’s a question whether we should even talk about re-politicization in any concrete, meaningful sense. And I also just want to make clear that some of these quantitative data are also indications. There’s obviously a more atmospheric argument you can make about high politics that’s now intruded into the private sphere in a way that it didn’t in the 90s and 2000s. I think there’s lots of anecdotal evidence you can gather for it. And that there’s a continuity which shouldn’t be denied. The first point to make is these chronologies are not perfectly neat. So you cannot choose a perfect cut-off point at which you say now this form ends and the next begins. There’s an overlap, there’s all kinds of hybridity, and particularly if you look at different national cases, it’s clear that if you look at, for example, decision-making in large part of the West, that’s still a largely technocratic, not particularly political affair. The idea that post-politics is somehow history on that level of society, on that level of the power structure, obviously seems wildly implausible. I do think the data indicates something important. So what is specific about BLM and also the No Kings protests we saw this and last month is that they are enormously numerous purely in quantitative terms. So I think there was an estimate that the last No Kings march was one of the largest or maybe the largest turnout in American history, purely in the quantitative sense. But what is the thing about it or what is it about that that makes it so vastly different from let’s say the march on Washington? I think one thing to indicate is obviously that violence has decreased to a very significant extent. Those previous protest movements took place in a society in which violence was much more banal, in which let’s say also political violence was much more widespread, and that is simply not the case today. And the other point is the extreme impermanence or short-termism of that protest movement. So the civil rights movement and its culmination in these big marches on Washington was the outcome of a movement that fought in decades, that began during the Second World War when you have the more social wing of the civil rights movement and let’s say the 50s and 60s. And it’s a very, very patient labor that doesn’t just have a month or two months or a year as its horizon but really thinks in terms of where will we be in 20 years when we hope that this amendment or let’s say racial inequality has finally been legally abolished. And that is something that is completely lacking from these contemporary protest movements. They’re enormously powerful and frenetic in that extremely short timeframe, but a month later or let’s say six months later, there is very, very little that is left of it. And I think that’s also the case for BLM in so far as the summer of riots at the time, the highest estimates going to 25 million attendants, that gives you like one out of 10 American adults or something. It’s a really impressive number. But then the question one year later and certainly two years later, what’s happened to the police departments that were defunded is obviously well where did all of this energy go. And I think the continuity you talk about is partly because of the fact that the real decision makers in society still operate in a post-political mode. And there the hyper politics doesn’t seem to have intruded. And the extreme, let’s say, indurability or impermanence of protest makes you wonder whether there’s actually any politicization happen because it can span such a small time period. And then the next day it’s gone. So I make the comparison with a neutron bomb. So what a neutron bomb does is that it shakes all the people in the image, but the actual infrastructure is left intact. That’s precisely how it’s designed. I think that’s how hyper politicization also functions is that it has a very, very intense impact in that momentous instance. And then afterwards the question is, well, why is everything still left standing after the wave has passed?
[13:15.540] Sam: So let me ask one more question in this vein just to get the hypothesis out. You’ve only alluded to something that’s absolutely crucial, which is the kind of institutional slash social side, which is in your account what’s really lacking that characterize mass politics to which you and I might want to return, David, less so. But even if we concede that there’s hyper politicization, that remains the kind of lacking factor. And so just for listeners who haven’t yet picked up the book, could you just say something about how we know what that is when we are living in its presence?
[14:07.240] Jäger: I’ll make a contrast I’ve made before between, let’s say, the March on Washington in 1963 and the BLM protests in the summer of 2020. So in purely quantitative terms, the latter were more numerous, there were more people that showed up, but the morphology or the institutional embedding of that first versus that second protest movement is vastly different. And you can see it almost in a visual sense. If you look at pictures of the March on Washington, everyone is wearing buttons or stickers of the specific civil society organization or that subsection of the civil rights movement, which they represent, whether it’s a labor union, whether it’s a church, whether it’s a specific, let’s say, religious group, you can immediately recognize who marshaled or who commanded them to come there. And if you look at the BLM protest, you obviously have some recognizable color schemes. You might have certain people that have affiliation to NGOs, but most people are there because they saw something on WhatsApp or Instagram or they put a black square on their page there and they come as a kind of disaffiliated, I almost want to say lonely crowd that doesn’t have any prior membership, that doesn’t have a prehistory in the organization before they join the march, and then they don’t actually join an organization after the march. There obviously are some exceptions to it. I’m not saying there’s no infrastructure at all. That’s not something that protests are actually capable of. Pure spontaneity doesn’t exist. But still, on a purely visual level, the difference between 1963 and 2023 is already remarkable. And I do think the crisis of the membership model, both on the top end of the bottom society is the crucial story about deinstitutionalization, which the book tries to tell, because you can gather a lot of people in a square and you can get them to march on a parliament. You can even get them to ransack a Congress. But the question is, where have they been together before and where will they be together afterwards? And that completely changes the timeline of how you conceive of politics and also your capacity for social change. Because as I say, the Weberian notion of politics is something that’s hard drilling or slow drilling through hard boards requires you to think we might not be able to solve this particular social problem next month or next year, but we do want to have a sense of where we’ll be in 10 years. But if you have these extremely short lifecycles for social movements, it becomes very difficult to think about how can protests become politics and then how can politics become policy? And that loop has completely broken down in the political culture I’m describing, where the pipeline from protest to the political and then to the policy level, which I think was very recognizably there with something like the civil rights movement, particularly with mass movements, also in Europe throughout the 20th century, has evaporated, basically.
[16:46.720] David: Okay, this is great. This is exactly where I wanted to go. To me, the book read a little bit like a kind of exciting and exciting political theory driven counterpart to the more stolid American politics book that was a bit of a hit a couple of years ago, Hollow Parties by Daniel Schlossman and Sam Rosenfeld. And they actually end up in the same place arguing with the central problem of American politics and particularly the American left is the decline of mass membership political parties. But a question I had about that and I also have about your book is that mass membership political parties in America with a very small historical exception have not been particularly ideological. If you look at our mass membership political parties, the organization, they’re in fact run by what James Q. Whitman called professional democrats in direct contrast with ideological amateur democrats, which is his term, which were understood as a bit more fly by night, less organized due to their being ideological. They’re less, they’re not Tammany Hall, they’re reform. Reform is a morning glory in George Washington Plunkett’s famous term. So you kind of imagine mass politics is like something like going to mass protest, this ideological trance state, which people are going to be unified and then go into action afterwards. But I think that given America’s broad diversity, it’s a big country with lots of things going on and our political structure, which don’t really allow for movement control of the gears of government, the national government level, but certainly across the government, that ideological mass politics is ideological, in a lot of ways a weird fit with what America is structurally in government. So what do you think?
[18:20.280] Jäger: I broadly agree. So there’s one disclaimer I’ll immediately add is that this is in many ways a book also about the US written from a European perspective. So I would not deny that as some European prejudice or some European myopia and how I conceive of mass politics and particularly the idea that mass politics is a specifically transformative or revolutionary phenomenon even, which certainly in the American, but also in the European cases, not borne out by the record. I mean, there is a mass politics on the right, a fascist mass politics, but there’s also, let’s say, a more quietist stable mass politics in terms of Christian democracy in which you can have very high institutionalization, really large membership organizations, but they’re not politicized at all. And I mean, there’s a kind of Tocquevillian utopia where what you want is high institutionalization, low politicization. As you say, mass politics in the American case has mostly been that. It’s been high civil density, but not necessarily a lot of social ambition or sort of high political tension precisely, since it’s not driven by ideology. I will say two or I will give two counter examples. I think the populist party or the populist movement of the late 19th century is in many ways the last example of the more organic grassroots mass politics, which is severely underdeveloped in the US case. I do think that the current bipartisan system was also constructed in response to that third party threat, because in the end it was the most successful third party. And afterwards, particularly with the progressive era, I think the New Deal is an interesting intermission there. Mass politics remains strange, hybrid, underdeveloped and not particularly transformative. So as I say, Tocquevillian. At the same time, what Schlossmann also says in this book, The Hollow Parties, you mentioned is that even if the Democrats and the Republicans are more like state departments or ministries than mass parties, because they are in many ways completely state-ified as institutions, they’re not really part of society, but they really inhabit the state. Throughout the New Deal period and even in the post-war period, they were still mass parties by proxy, precisely because behind them was a hinterland of all kinds of civil society institutions. So Theda Scotchpole has a lot of really interesting material precisely on the history of these American membership organizations. And this kind of kept them connected to some, let’s say backyard that was more densely organized. What really is the story, I think, of American post-politics in the 90s and 2000s is that that hinterland shrivels and the parties completely retreat into the state and they face a void, let’s say, in their social wiring. And from a more normative point of view, I certainly don’t want to say that the return of mass politics in an American sense necessarily implies a rosy scenario for the left. So I think left-wing politics without mass politics is enormously difficult. I certainly do not want to say that mass politics is intrinsically transformative. There is a Tocquevillian variant of it. I do think what the record of the last 20ish years show is that doing left politics without a mass base is an enormously fickle affair. It’s very unreliable and it is an elite pressure.
[21:30.680] David: So I want to ask you a question from the exact opposite direction too. So one thing that this kind of look at politics does is it irons out actual decisions made by actual people. And so I’ll ask you another question about inflation later, which I think plays a big role in your and other accounts. But the Democrats in recently, they lost an election, they lost power, and we go through this moment that we’re going through. And there’s ways in which this is determined structurally, but they also could have spent a little less and caused a little less inflation. They could have adopted a less politically suicidal immigration policy. They could have not nominated Methuselah. Are these things completely epiphenomenal in your view? Or is it like among the elite actors, is there still choice that could then shape the way politics goes?
[22:18.880] Jäger: I think the space for choice has been highly constrained. So the choice matrix, so to speak, has become much tighter. I certainly think that the tolerance for certain types of radical politics and your capacity to even execute a radical platform is exactly also what you buy as votes has become enormously slim. And I think the story is very, very similar that the constraints on political choice have become progressively narrower in the last 30 years. At the same time, your capacity to translate policy results into the building of a constituency has also become more difficult. So let’s take Bidenism as an example and the green reindustrialization push that happened at the end of the Biden term. There’s now quite a lot of research that shows that the reason they weren’t able to translate that into a second presidential victory is precisely because all those rollouts, even in red states where you have decarbonization efforts that actually create a number of green jobs, they weren’t perceived as actually being due to decisions that were taken by Biden in Washington. It’s basically governors who actually took most of the credit for this. And this is, I think, a structural argument of how the Democratic Party is unable to basically build itself a base on the basis of the policy results it achieves, because it could not communicate in a very dispersed information environment as well to voters: we took this decision. You are now seeing the results of it, let’s say, in your street or in your state, and therefore you deserve or you should give us a second vote. And this means that, yes, the choice matrix has become more constrained. It’s become much harder to implement certain policy platforms. But the capacity to even convince voters that you’re the one or you’re the one who is influencing the variables that influence their daily lives, that has also dissipated because there is no such thing as a party infrastructure that can actually bind voters to them. The fact that the single incumbency story, etc., etc., also ties into this. Yes, inflation and all these variables matter. But at the same time, the decline of the more civic side of parties has made it possible for you to even build an electoral coalition that can survive across different presidential cycles, for example.
[24:26.760] Sam: OK. I’d just like to return to something you said in passing, just to ask a little more about it, because I would say one of the most distinctive things about the book, besides the actual argument, which is, I think, quite interesting, is that you are a Europeanist mainly talking about the United States. And as you said, there’s perspective that you gain from implicit or explicit comparison across the Atlantic, but also potential distortion if it’s true that the classical form of mass politics, as it seems to be in your mind, is West European or Central European. And then there could be American equivalencies, like maybe the populist progressivist era, but big divergences, especially in the relevant era after World War II. So I just wanted to give you a chance to reflect a little more, especially because some of the most interesting passages are about basically French intellectuals and their reflections on politics, like Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon, especially Michel Houellebecq. And I’m down. I talk a lot about him in my current book, because in Annihilation, he is thinking about health care and end-of-life treatment and such. So could you just defend just your procedures?
[26:02.740] Jäger: Yes, and I think Houellebecq is in many ways a protagonist of the book. He appears in every chapter. He escorts us from one side of the argument to the other. I mean, I’m an avid reader and a big admirer of his entire other. And he’s also immensely useful insofar as an argument that would take me three pages is something he does in three sentences. It’s a bit what Lévi-Strauss said about Rousseau, is that what’s so amazing about Rousseau is that what takes him three sentences is what I have to do in three pages. I have a similar feeling with Houellebecq. The defense of the American angle, I’d say, comes in two forms. The contrast is useful, because Europeans are very used to adopting a template of mass politics from, let’s say, 20th century examples. And then you put it against the American case and you realize that it’s actually quite exceptional. So the American exceptionalism helps to prove the exceptionalism of the European case to say, well, this was a very strange period. The Americans actually have a default mode of politics that we’re now converging to. And that, giving me to the second point, is that the Americanization of European politics in the last 30 to 40 years, whether you want to talk about the empowerment of the judiciary, the let’s say, evaporation of these stable majorities, the presidentialization of European political systems, that has also gone hand in hand with an Americanization of what party and civil life looks like. So the disappearance of parties, the fusion of parties with the state, an enormous reliance on PR, public relations, and also digital outreach, and a very strong personalization of politics, that candidates rather than parties are now what actually determine whether you can win an election or not. And in the French case, I think that contrast between the old style mass politics, which you mainly had in the middle of the century and of which the French Communist Party was the prime example, and then the more American style primary. So primaries were this really controversial introduction in the 80s and 90s in France, precisely because it was seen as this dirty feature of an American constitutional order they did not want to see. But the fact that the French political system has been Americanizing and at the same time deinstitutionalization actually helps me tell the story more. And Ernaux, Houellebecq,, and also Eribon are observers of the decline of French mass politics and also, I mean, diagnosticians of Americanization, of the story of how France has become more American and thereby Europe as a whole now comes to resemble it. So it’s a convergence story about both sides of the Atlantic actually moving closer and closer to each other.
[28:35.920] David: So I want to ask about that convergence, because one of the other features of the same period is a story of wild divergence between America and Europe and just in their economic situation. So US obviously had a bad recession in 2008, but Europe had a much worse one. And the US had a much faster recovery than Europe did post 2008. And while the US had a very bad COVID, worse than most European, bad, a bad COVID period, it had a much faster and much, much, much faster economic growth out of COVID. And so now compared to where things were 25 years ago, the US is much richer. And it’s not just like vacations or anything. It’s like the US is now much, much richer than Europe is. You can see this in any number of statistics you want to look at. And one maybe naive thought is that this should have some effect on politics. That is to say, like, I don’t know, like you don’t have to be a wild materialist to think that like countries that are doing economically well should look different in some ways than ones that are doing economically well. And obviously there’s a lot of diversity in Europe. But your book doesn’t spend any time on this. And it seems to treat politics as independently or maybe technologically determined as opposed to being determined by conditions. And I can see why you think that. But I want you to be curious to see what you think about that, which is to say, to what extent, given this wild economic divergence, why is it we see convergence?
[29:59.840] Jäger: Yes, I mean, two points. I think there’s some skepticism as to how you want to run the numbers and how you compare. So there’s been a lot of debate about whether sort of relative American and European wealth are actually that divergent. What I think is absolutely clear, no matter what you think, what the Americans have gotten much richer than Europeans in the last 10 years, that the Europeans completely mismanaged or epically mismanaged the aftermath of their 2008-2009 crisis and crisis fighting in the U.S. was much more effective. I mean, the point if you want to talk about, let’s say, 50 percent youth unemployment in some Midwestern state, it’s very clear that the Fed would immediately step in and do something about it. That’s basically what they did to Spain and Greece with even higher numbers. So, yes, it’s particularly the question of crisis manager after 2008-2009, which I think explains relative divergence between Europe and the U.S. And I think the more important dimension of that is not just the question of whether Europe has gotten poorer in any absolute hard quantitative sense, but that it’s basically become a geopolitical plaything of these new rising powers or some established powers. So the fact that Europe doesn’t have any sense of geopolitical independence, it’s not even
a unified geopolitical actor, that I think is really an important part of the Euro-American divergence you’re talking about. At the same time, what the book hints at, but it doesn’t actually explore, and I now regret it insofar as it’s a very important part of the story. This is a book about hyperpolitics’ effects on the bottom half of society, on, let’s say, either disempowerment or hyperpolitics as an incapacity for social change from below. The question you have to ask about elites and hyperpolitics is equally important, if not more important, namely, what happens when elites re-politicize but don’t reinstitutionalize? What if elites become more invested in politics? What if they spend more money on it when they have more of an interest in, let’s say, having a say in government or having a seat at a table, whether for extractive or regulatory reasons, but they don’t have a stable institutional vessel for it? And I think the European, and to some extent also the American story, is that hyperpolitics in office or hyperpolitics on an elite level is an equally confusing and dangerous story because it basically leads to fractions between the elite and an incapacity to establish elite coherence and an incapacity to do long-term elite planning. And I don’t want to make wide extrapolations towards the first year of the second Trump term, but the radical short-termism, the incapacity to even think about what you’re going to be doing a week afterwards, I think also has to do with the fact that elites lack the institutions to basically organize themselves. That doesn’t mean they’re no longer in power or that they’re somehow becoming poorer or that they’ve lost, let’s say, their grip on the social power gradient, but it’s more if you want to stabilize your rule, both within the elite and project power outside of the elite, so by consent. And so if you don’t have a stable institutional vessel or a party for it, that leads to permanent instability. And I think there the spectacular counterfactual is obviously the Chinese elite that actually has this institution called the CCP that both coheres different factions of the Chinese bourgeoisie and actually allows them to buy in or both through repression, but also, let’s say, to popular buy-in through the population. That is something the Americans and Europeans don’t have. And I think it leads to chaos. It’s a part of the explanation of the chaos we’ve seen in the last two years.
[33:24.920] David: So I would have thought that a story that would link that elite and mass story would be not one of like political independence. These things are happening as trends in politics that could be, but rather one where politics is not downstream from economic outcomes, but from technological development. You’d say something would be like that basically it’s the phones that did it and the variety of politics. And like that version of the story allows you to have politics being completely independent of outcomes because it’s being driven, but still be materially determined by the nature of media or whatever. And so you hint at this as a story, a causal story, but you give other independent developments. I’m just curious about like how you think about the degree to which, and it might help with the China example as well. Like to what extent is this all driven by like the mass change, the changes we’ve had in media culture that have maybe political organization is downstream of?
[34:21.960] Jäger: Yeah. I mean, this is a question of causal priority, which is a tricky one. I don’t think I have a sort of sufficiently exhaustive answer. I don’t want to trade in technological determinism. So the book is doing a kind of overcorrection there because it basically says we have a lot of stories about the 2010s that basically say it’s all phones. So in 2008, 2009, you have the credit crash, but you also have the invention of the iPhone. And if you have a politics that’s purely wired and powered by this new device, then yes, you can expect this kind of volatility. But at the same time, we’re quite familiar with certain journalistic arguments where the idea is that the Brexit vote happened because there were certain Russian bots that launched certain types of Facebook ads. The idea that Cambridge Analytica is somehow responsible for the Brexit vote and also for Trump. That I think is the bad version of technological determinism I don’t want to fall into. At the same time, I’m willing to admit it’s an overcorrection that the book doesn’t, I think, have a convincing causal picture of how you should balance, let’s say, political and economic story versus the more independently technological story that says, well, if you have a politics, which both citizens and politicians and technocrats and even the wealthiest donors mainly experience on that small screen, well, that’s obviously going to impose some constraints or it’s going to have a structural influence on how people relate to politics. Just talk about, let’s say, the ideological menu, which the latest shooter of the latest attempt on Trump’s life was done by someone who had an ideological muddle in his head as to why he did this, that I think can mainly be explained to the fact that a large part of his political education and life happened online. So yes, obviously the phone and the computer mattered a lot. At the same time, to reduce it to that and to say that this macro historical event 2008, 2009 somehow doesn’t matter, that I find very dubitable. So I’m settling for some kind of multi-causal middle way to say technology matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters.
[36:26.520] Sam: OK, Anton, I want to ask you a couple of kind of interlocking questions about what you, I think beautifully at one point called the great withdrawal, which is the kind of atomization and syndrome of bowling alone in Robert Putnam’s phrase that you appropriate that really characterized kind of all of the forms of politics since mass politics in different ways. And I just want to ask first, since you, as I’ve been, are pretty cynical about or contemptuous of the fascism hypothesis, why is it so appealing across the partisan spectrum really to, in a sense, disregard the great withdrawal and really, let’s say, long to interpret our time as something like a return to mass political life with all of its dangers and risks, including fascism and violence? So could you just say a bit, what is that, what does it reveal that we’ve had this kind of detour into this fascism debate about which you’re pretty, I don’t know, you think it was a kind of blind alley or a mistake? So comment.
[38:00.840] Jäger: Yes, no, I don’t think it was a very productive avenue. I think it was a dangerous heuristic. I mean, that’s a strong way of putting it, but I do think that it actually led to political mistakes. I think it was a political notion that actually had politically quite disastrous strategic consequences. The first reason or the first motivation as to why people became so attached to it, I think has to do, it makes people’s life easier. It makes the world seem less bleak or more hopeful in an interesting way because it gentrifies your own resistance. It gives you a picture of heroism. It allows you to replay these pedagogical stories of 20th century mass democracy and saying we’re fighting 1933 all over again and thereby we just have to follow that playbook. It’s just also predictable. I think that’s a basic point. We know this story, so we should just replay it so you don’t actually have to think on your own feet. From the left, I think it has a more nefarious and dangerous consequence. This is a story, as I said, mainly about the center. On the left, I think it leads to an overestimation of your own strength, particularly within contemporary American society. 20th century fascism in every case was a function not of a pre-revolutionary but at least of a semi-revolutionary left. That doesn’t mean it has to directly respond to that. That doesn’t mean it always has to crush a revolution, but it comes about in an ecosystem in which the left was enormously close to power and mostly failed to achieve a revolutionary breakthrough. That obviously has a premise, namely very strongly organized, militant, even, let’s say, dangerously revolutionary left. The idea that that is not around or on the table now, that it might take a really long time to reconstruct that, that we’re not even in a pre-pre-pre- pre-revolutionary situation, that the means and the capacity for social change in the 21st century have become much more difficult than before. That is a difficult pill to swallow. It’s much easier to think that, well, the fascists are here, so this means they’re here because we are so strong. Then when you properly look in the mirror, you realize that you’ve completely overestimated it. I often use this metaphor that if you want to climb a mountain, you actually have to make sure you have a geographic sense of how steep it is. What the left does, if it trades in the fascism analogy, is basically completely underestimate the steepness of the hill it has to climb. The second point, it de facto forces itself into a popular front alliance with parts of the liberal center, which I think are one of the main reasons as to why the politics of the 2010s were so chaotic in the first place, because liberalism fails. The contemporary far right is a function of the failure of liberalism, not of the strength of the left. This is, in one way, also a mass politics story, because if what the left is doing is mass politics rather than hyper politics, then yes, the right might be fascist. What that also implies is that once the left starts doing mass politics again, yes, then I am willing to predict that we’ll get to see certain variants on the right that are much closer to 20th century fascism. That is something I’m willing to say. It’s very clear that mass politics and mass killing were also very closely connected across the 20th century. Let’s say Michael Mann, the sociologist’s book on democracy and genocide, makes this point very strongly. Namely, mass politics has a right wing variant. The SS is an engine of social mobility and all the killing is a mass political phenomenon. This means being nostalgic or romantic about it is not necessary either. At the same time, the overestimation is what I mainly find so dangerous about the fascism frame, the idea that the left is somehow in power and that the right is therefore counter reacting to it.
[41:45.440] Sam: Well, you’re preaching to the converted on all this. I just add that the hyper political age, if we’re calling it that, has been marked by extremely low levels of political violence, even when you take account of the return of assassinations and American assassination attempts. Let me imagine some pushback from someone who is, let’s say, cynical about these European examples of class warfare and revolution, but would say, actually, our version of fascism was mainly a response to the emancipation of blacks and women. There is some evidence that there is not just a kind of white supremacist core to Trumpism, but also a patriarchal one. Could you just comment a bit on that? He replaced Barack Obama, etc.
[42:50.460] Jäger: Yes. I think it’s an important question. There is obviously the argument that Robert Paxton once made, the veteran scholar of fascism, who also at one point ran over into the fascism camp and basically said that Trump qualified for the effort. In one of his books, he says that, for example, the Ku Klux Klan to him is one of the first species of a fascist movement. It appears, of course, in a non-European setting, and then he switches to the 1920s and 1930s. So it’s not as if this American angle was always absent from it. What I find tricky about the whitelash or the backlash thesis of fascism, where you say you don’t need to have a revolutionary left, you can have a proliferation of all these new social groups entering into the public sphere, or at least entering certain professional spheres where they weren’t before, they’re achieving a certain cultural dominance, and thereby this calls for a counter-revolutionary reaction.
But once again, the question to me is not whether parts of American white society object to this. What does American business think about this development? Fascism is unimaginable without the business component. It doesn’t mean that business financed fascism. Doesn’t mean that fascism was driven as a business plot. The really crucial variable in the governmental success of fascism is whether you can convince the business community to consider bringing a fascist into power, to actually let them do the dirty work against the labor movement for them. It is not clear to me that American business perceives a profound social threat in the emancipation of the African American or female population. I do not see that. There might be sections of American capital that believe that, but they’re very minor. The majority of American business responded to January 6th with a call to immediately recognize the new president and stop all this rioting. Once again, this brings us back to the crisis of liberalism rather than the strength of the left. The contemporary right is a function of the inability for liberalism to achieve stable hegemony after 2010. It is not a function of the left that’s on the verge of power.
[45:03.120] David: I want to again shift gears a little bit back towards the more prosaic maybe, which is one of the things about your, you have this wonderful graph of periods of politicization. And one of the things is they’re highly associated with inflationary moments. That is to say the periods of politicization, when you see bumps in your graph, I mean there are longer trends, but the bumps are associated with periods of inflation. And you give the Trilateral Commission a good bit of grief for its comment that inflation is the economic disease of democracies as kind of an anti-democratic attitude. But I wonder a little bit about what you think of the opposite, which is that inflation is the fire of excessive politicization. Basically, the necessary component for periods of depoliticization is maintaining a stable price level. So the reason that the political conflagrations of the 1990s stayed extremely calm despite deinstitutionalization and all the things that were going on was that inflation stayed low and even the crash of 2000-2001 was pretty limited in structure. And so what do you think of that idea?
[46:27.600] Jäger: I think it’s broadly compelling. I think there’s a chicken and egg problem there, whether it’s the deflation that reads the depoliticization or the depoliticization presupposes deflation. I think you can make versions of both arguments. It’s very obvious that deflation and price stability privilege a certain emphasis on private consumption. If you want to stabilize the regime of consumption, you need stable price levels. And yes, I think it’s very clear that over politicization, you don’t even have to buy the whole Huntington or trilateral commission thesis to accept that. Mass politics and certainly high politicization has potentially inflationary consequences. That doesn’t mean that inflation is always a product of high politicization. It doesn’t have to be. But yes, I think the correlation is very, very clear. And I mean, Charles Maier in his work on the 1920s and 1930s, particularly on Germany and these different sort of attempts to stabilize bourgeois Europe at the time, very clearly makes the argument that, yes, I mean, mass politics is a very important factor in causing these inflationary moments. And I do think that the key story about the 70s and 80s, which is not told enough, for example, in that work on individualization and Robert Putnam, is that the political sort of the 70s and 80s is the question of how one can exit the inflationary spiral. And the diagnosis on which the business community, but also trilateral commission and in the end, a lot of policymakers settle on is, well, we have to break these labor cartels or labor is the easiest victim to remove the main driver of inflationary pressures. That I think leads to a debate in economic history that’s much trickier, namely what actually stopped the inflation of the 70s. Is it just breaking the backbone of labor? Is it a question of, let’s say, breaking the hold of all these civil society groups on the state? I think there’s something to be said about that. I mean, there’s other economic historians that say, like, well, inflation was solved through other means. Namely, they found a different oil supply than the one that was there in the Middle East and they solved that kind of problem. So I’m not confident making a very definite pronouncement on what actually ended it. I’m willing to settle on the correlation, namely, yes, politicization has potentially inflationary consequences and moments of depoliticization will have a deflationary dynamic. I think with Bidenism and the inflationary moment there, I’m not sure it was a process of high politicization. Maybe yes, maybe you can make this argument that a lot of gifts were handed out and thereby they overheated the economy. But yes, I’m willing to say that I’ll leave that to the specialist.
[49:00.580] David: That’s the Larry Summers overspending caused inflation. I mean, there are other people who have a different view about supply chains, but like that’s one of the stories is politicization.
[49:10.700] Jäger: Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think a version of it might be true in so far as the Bidenites try to please a lot of people at the same time. And this obviously might lead to a kind of dynamic in which the so-called wage price spirals, etc. might be a problem. Other people say that, oh, no, it’s all just sellers inflation. It’s certain choke points that are exploited by powerful players and thereby that drives with the inflation. I don’t think I have the expertise to sort of decide which side is right. And I don’t think the debate is settled either. It’s too fresh.
[49:41.680] Sam: All right. A last question for me about this book, which I’ll just mention in passing is also characteristically well-written. It’s a fun read and I love the cover. I don’t know where David is on Tillman’s and all of all of that. But I really want to ask about, you know, the way out. So it’s not even implicit that what would really need to happen for a left view or a progressive view or maybe even a left liberal view is not hyperpolitics, but some kind of restoration of the institutional and social base for politics. And you have some very interesting passages about how the right, of course, responding like the left to the same basic set of dilemmas is able to prevail without resocializing, whereas the left can never do so. So I don’t know if you want to repeat that argument or just give us some kind of prognostication about whether a way out is possible, especially when you comment that the virtue of the fascism hypothesis was in a sense to give us a kind of resistance posture that would allegedly allow an exit, which has proved false.
[51:10.960] Jäger: Yes. Yeah. As I said, I think it gentrified a type of quite easy liberal activism. I think people are now realizing that since there’s now a resistance diaspora in Canada, if they actually believe that he was Hitler, then maybe they would have planned for something different in the end. I think, yes, the key task is reinstitutionalization. And it’s mainly written from a left-wing perspective. So reinstitutionalization there, I think, Rayne turns around an almost Leninist question and how can you reconstitute the party without cloning a dinosaur, as I call it in a recent piece, because you cannot take the DNA of a 20th century mass party and somehow implement it, hope it grows into the current temporary ecosystem and then survives. I don’t think that’s possible. Well, you have to look for some kind of genetic hybrid. So a party that operates at different speeds where you might have more militant members that are part of the church militant that spend their entire lives in the party. And then you have much looser or let’s say even digital followers that don’t have to spend their entire lives in those kinds of institutions and where you might accept that there’s been a change in political culture. And I don’t think that sociology is destiny in so far as people are unwilling to reengage themselves in those institutions today. So in the US, I just want to say there are legal restrictions on union formation. If you would lift them and the Supreme Court would shed its initiative on this, then maybe what, who knows how Americans will associate once it becomes easier to do so. You should also do it when it’s hard. Once the legal environment becomes more friendly, I think that yes, there is just a capacity to re-institutionalize. I think this is also a problem on the right. Because you say the right has a structural advantage, particularly within a capitalist society for a variety of reasons compared to the left. But when the right wants to be truly ambitious and transformative, it also faces an institutional question. I want to talk about the issue of mass deportations. Adrian Vermeule, as the Trump 2.0 administration got in, said the contemporary right or the Trumpite right has to think carefully about the idea that they want to deconstruct the administrative state and do mass deportations. Those two objectives don’t go together. In fact, you need an enormously powerful administrative state to carry that out. What you see with ICE and the empowerment of the deportation machine is precisely this contradiction working out. They’ve privatized part of this task. I think they hope to use ICE as a kind of civic launching pad for more sturdier rights. So instead of bowling alone, you can hunt for migrants together or something like that. But at the same time, I think the erratic and very volatile and I’d say in many ways the retreat they did in Minneapolis are an indication that ICE is not the institutional basis that even the contemporary Trump right has hoped it would find through this kind of strategy. Now, obviously there’s always private money on the right and that makes mass mobilization less necessary because you have other mobilizational tools. But if you want a truly transformative right, you have to reconstitute a mass political force. And even the Trumpite right has not done that because in the end, I will say it is Trump and his smartphone. You have the Camarilla around him that’s trying to feed things into the machine, but then there’s no mass party. There are no members. And I’m sorry, I do not see this evolving into an American NSDAP or an Italian fascist party. I’m just sorry. I do not see it happening.
[54:43.940] Sam: Well, this has been great. I just comment that somehow it’s symbolic that one destiny of ICE after the Minneapolis and Broglio was to service the airports when there was no deal around funding the transport sector. Anyway, this has been amazing. I’ve loved it and I’m really grateful for your time. I know David is provoked and will think more left wing thoughts now. So we’ve achieved a great victory.
[55:16.100] David: Thank you so much.
[55:18.300] Sam: Thank you, Anton.
[55:19.300] Jäger: Thank you to you both. Thank you so much for having me.