Friday essay: we’re all ‘political’ now – but can that lead to real change?

It was the summer of 2024 in Carindale, Queensland.

I had gone to a salon for lashes and somehow found myself inside a political monologue.

The gen Z eyelash artist was white, university educated, hit hard by COVID, barely getting by.

She was also fiercely anti-vaccine – and devoted to Donald Trump with the confidence of someone who had found, at last, a story that made the chaos cohere.

I mostly listened.

Her world had too many moving parts: lockdowns, debt, work that did not pay enough, institutions she didn’t trust, online spaces she did.

Trump gave shape to it by supplying villains, certainty and, most importantly, structure.

I lay there with my eyes taped up, which is perhaps the ideal posture for receiving a monologue about the end of liberal democracy.

A year and a half later, reading Belgian historian Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics , I kept thinking of her.

Review: Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger (Verso Books) Hyperpolitics names a world in which everything is political, yet politics is rarely durable.

Private life comes with public meanings attached: the cola you drink, the person you date , the family member you cut ties with , the school your child attends , the vaccine you take (or refuse).

Jäger names the atmosphere of our time with real force.

What he does less well is explain who has been formed by this atmosphere.

The young eyelash artist in Carindale was not apolitical or disengaged.