Hyperpolitics

William Davies: Easy to join, easy to leave. London Review of Books.

Crucially, however, while politicisation has continued to escalate, institutionalisation is at a low ebb. This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave. The chasm between politics and policy widens, as the former becomes a fruitless stream of outrage with little or no practical consequence.

Daniele Palmer: A Crisis of Belonging. Commonweal.

In place of swarm-like protest, Jäger wants to see not less politicization but more durable forms through which it can become consequential. Throughout the book, he returns to mass parties and trade unions: institutions that, in their heyday, aggregated grievances, trained activists, and translated diffuse discontent into strategic leverage. In the absence of such groups, today’s protests risk resembling not the organized politics of the 1930s but the recurrent peasant uprisings of the ancien régime. While they may register anger, they struggle to alter underlying inequalities.