We’ve Got a Bad Case of ‘Hyperpolitics’

Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences Anton Jäger Verso (2026)

Many of us in North America and Europe have been baffled by the rise of leaders like Donald Trump, who seem to break laws with impunity while flouting the conventional wisdom about political success.

Trump and other right-wing populist leaders do and say things that would once have ended political careers on the spot. But now they go on and on, invulnerable.

Belgian historian Anton Jäger , currently a lecturer in politics and international relations at University College, Oxford, offers some explanations that make a kind of sense in his latest book. But he doesn’t offer a way out of our present problems.

In Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences , Jäger argues that for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, “mass politics” produced both democracies and autocracies.

In mass politics, political parties proposed detailed programs and enrolled huge memberships who expected those programs to be carried out when their parties gained power.

In Jäger’s terms, mass politics was characterized by “high institutionalization” and “high politicization.” The parties were themselves institutions of civil society, offering sports, education, arts and other social programs as well as policy platforms. With high politicization, everything was political, from chess clubs to movies and plays.

Mass politics enabled totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; it also enabled democracies like Canada and the U.S.

During the late 1980s, Jäger tells us, mass politics began to fade. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and its allies found themselves victorious but adrift, trying to find reasons to sustain policies and institutions now obsolete.

The 1990s and early 2000s were the age of “post-politics,” when, Jäger writes, “journalistic brouhaha over sex scandal and election fraud papered over the growing retreat from public life initiated by the American populace.”

“Workplace and community associations were dissolving in the acid of deindustrialization and triumphant market logic,” Jäger writes.

“Always an instantiation of imperfect party competition, the American duopoly [of Democrats and Republicans] was becoming an effective example of non-competition; the semi-sovereign people, as political scientist Elmer Schattschneider had once termed them, were increasingly non-sovereign. In conditions of convergence, culture wars alone offered a simulacrum of rivalry.”

This situation was a triumph of free-market globalism, also known as neoliberalism. American political institutions, especially unions, were moribund.

Political parties themselves lost most of their grassroots infrastructure, transforming themselves into what Jäger calls “cartels,” concerned with preserving their bases while hoping to gain enough independent voters to win the next election. Post-politics was a time of low politicization and low institutionalization.