Re: <nettime> Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hello nettimers -

Turns out that the current New Left Review contains a text by Jaeger on
Hyperpolitics - concise and much clearer than the book itself. He offers no
answers to the dilemma he describes, but it's still worth reading. I paste
it below.

His point is that after a politically quiescent 1990s and early 2000s,
hyperpolitical agitation at the grassroots has broken up the established
codes and routine operating systems of elites in both government and
business. This multiplication of grassroots critiques and demands, driven
by ballooning inequality, has forced the elites into rhetorical extremes to
cover up their actual deeds (cf Obama after 2008), thereby creating
fast-paced chaos without any feasible vision for the future (cf Trump right
now).

He barely mentions social media, which seems like a gaping hole in the
argument. But maybe that's OK. Maybe the core issue is not the media system
(in which both TV and radio still play major roles) but instead, the
degeneration of political parties cut off from any popular base,
functionally attached to corporate and financial priorities, yet still
periodically dependent on elections where policy debates are replaced by
mediated shouting matches around hot-button slogans.

The challenging thing here is the idea that elite fragmentation is driven
from the bottom. It suggests that those of us who were not politically
quiescent in the 1990s-2000s were dead wrong in our calls for networked
self-organization and exodus from formal institutions (OK, probably most
accept that by now). It also suggests that DSA-style party building is
necessary for any possible change, but can only succeed with attendant
cultural transformations away from the idea that your favorite
chest-thumping single issue is enough to make democracy viable.

My view is that self-organization is great for civil society - we really
need exodus from corrupt institutions. But it doesn't absolve you from
engaging with those institutions, and trying to found better ones. Surely
we can all agree that democracy has failed in the US right now, and is in
the process of failing nearly everywhere else. The problem is the lack of
any coherent replacement for hyperpolitical agitation - whether that's a
strong social-democratic state, or some new variant of communism, with
centralized planning (particularly for the urgencies of climate change),
but without the authoritarian rule that has doomed communist states in the
past. Obviously this turns the question toward China, whose tempered
authoirtarianism has not succumbed to hyperpolitics. Jaeger's best line, in
the text below, is when he says that would-be reformers in the West "should
at least think about what Washington and Brussels’s answer to the CCP’s new
party-state would look like."

* * *

Anton Jäger
Hyperpolitics in Command?

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii159/articles/anton-jager-hyperpolitics-in-command

One of the arresting aspects of the current conjuncture in the West is the
scrambling of elite political culture. Across the Atlantic world,
established codes of rule are no longer securely linked to actions or
intentions - to such an extent that they have become illegible to the
governing classes themselves. Trump's conduct of world affairs is the most
glaring example. Casual remarks - 'The negotiations are going great' - may
turn out to signal the onset of war, or not. Exterminationist threats - 'A
whole civilization will die tonight' - may indicate a ceasefire.footnote1
Trump is often read as the cause of every other world distemper, from the
EU being at sixes and sevens to disarray over AI or strategic incoherence
in the Middle East. Yet what if Trump himself were to be treated as only a
symptom of a more general shift in ruling-class culture - albeit an
indicator grave enough to generate its own knock-on effects?

The experience of society's lower echelons may provide analogies for this
elite disarray. The rise of new online forms of popular political culture
in the West in the 2010s suggested the term 'hyperpolitics' to describe
their lopsided intensity, after the 'post-political' 1990s.footnote2 As the
hyperpolitical offensive gathered mass and speed in mid-decade, new genres
of politics crystallized and old ones were remade: Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn,
Sanders, Black Lives Matter, La France insoumise on the left; on the right,
Golden Dawn, Vox, Farage, MAGA and Le Pen. Much of this remained a mode of
engagement modelled on online life-worlds, characterized by volatile swarms
and high emotions; 'wars of manoeuvre', with intermittent bursts of
activism; frenetic cycles of outrage and burn-out; followers and witch
hunts. Its electoral interventions were usually dependent on an
influencer-style figurehead with outsize grip over the organization.
Compared to the Weberian ideo-type of bureaucratic political rationality -
the mode of the ministry and the briefcase - it was immediatist, rather
than planning for the generations to come; focused on online messaging more
than physical infrastructure. For all its furore, the hyperpolitical mode
lacked the mass-political tools - above all, strong party forms - to effect
concrete change.

Contrasted outcomes

Might the concept of hyperpolitics also help to detect and explain patterns
of behaviour among the ruling classes - not just in the us, but in Europe
as well? The contours of such an elite hyperpolitics can best be drawn by a
contrast to the post-politics of the 1990s, above and below. Economically,
the concerted capitalist offensive of the Thatcher–Reagan years left the
working classes with stagnant wages, longer hours and growing debts.
Socially and culturally, the aggressive marketization of everyday life and
atomization of civil society, together with the evisceration of
mass-membership parties, trade-union associations and public housing,
produced a form of popular de-institutionalization. In class terms, these
developments brought about both a complication and widening of existing
social cleavages, yet these fractures rarely found lasting political
reflection; they ushered in what the German sociologist Klaus Dörre termed
demobilisierte Klassengesellschaften - 'demobilized class
societies'.footnote3 Politically, 1989 saw the disappearance of whatever
type of post-capitalist horizon was represented by state socialism - and
the diminution of social democracy, as the former workers' parties
rebranded themselves as social liberals or 'centre left'. The upshot for
electoral politics in the 1990s was mass desertion from below, as Peter
Mair was among the first to understand.footnote4

The outcome for the ruling classes proved no less momentous. Economically,
the deregulatory 1990s brought soaring wealth and hot global-capital flows.
Socially and culturally, the class of asset-owners expanded and
diversified, welcoming fresh hordes of the new super-rich. Politically, as
Mair also pointed out, the elites, too, were withdrawing from democratic
engagement. Such desertion from above took a different form from its
popular counterpart: not de-institutionalization, but 'retreating into an
official world'.footnote5 The institutions that came to the fore,
dominating headlines in the 90s and early 2000s - the Federal Reserve, imf,
World Bank, G7 - were sealed off from popular pressures. Inversely, many of
them were open to business influence, mediated by the sprawling lobby
complexes in Washington and Brussels. For the latter, the post-Maastricht
European Union was consciously constructed as a 'depoliticized polity', as
Mair had it, insulated from the citizenry, even as supranationally agreed
policies penetrated deeper into daily life with the launch of the Euro and
exponential growth in EU directives.

For the ruling classes too, this was a 'post-political' age, if politics is
defined as agonistic - the struggle over what modes of social organization
should prevail in a given territory. All now elatedly agreed with Thatcher
that there was 'no alternative', although a more emollient and optimistic,
even 'progressive' social liberalism became the dominant outlook,
epitomized by the Blairs and Clintons, untroubled by the spells in office
of the centre rights. Governing elites maintained a tight hold over the
hollowed-out mass-party forms, though advertising agencies, focus groups
and opinion polls now replaced the party conference or local branch and
regional structures in generating 'the vision'. Party officials still
performed recruitment and patronage functions, as gatekeepers on the path
to political power; their partisan identities - colour, symbol, motto -
still structured elections. But the parties of government increasingly
became para-state vessels or vehicles for the donor class, no longer
pretending to fulfil their traditional role of popular
representation.footnote6 What an elderly Habermas described as the new
structural transformation of the public sphere contributed a further degree
of atomization.footnote7

This golden age for Western governing elites nevertheless bred potential
problems for their class rule. First, the very transformation of asset
wealth on which the new elite floated threatened to fracture the internal
coherence of the ruling classes, for whom wealth, power and territory had
traditionally gone hand in hand. The effects of economic globalization -
bringing foreign-institutional ownership of national assets and the
dilution of local capitalist classes, amid the swirl of international funds
- has also broken the previous links of kinship and culture between state
elites and asset-owners. This made further fractures likely, both with
voters and with other capitalist sectors. The process was most extreme in
Britain, where Thatcher's 1986 'big bang' deregulation of the financial
sector blew up not only the 'gentlemanly capitalism' of the City of London
but also the provincial structures of local bank managers and Rotary Club
businessmen whose families had staffed the intermediate ranks of the
Conservative Party. The globalization of wealth, while politics remained
residually national, introduced comparable intra-elite contradictions in
other countries. Though France and Germany fought much harder to protect
their 'national champions' in high-end engineering (the last British
carmaker was sold off long ago), their banks nonetheless found American
subprime mortgages more enticing. In the us, the state–capital nexus was
less dependent on kith and kin, being robustly institutionalized in the
lobbying industry that channelled corporate inducements to appropriate
Congressional Committee members. But here, too, the onset of ruthless
mergers and acquisitions, asset-stripping and outsourcing, helped to weaken
links between enterprise and place.

Second, the desiccation of the mass-party capillary structures that once
connected elected governments to local supporters has weakened rulers'
ability to forge hegemonic cross-class blocs or mobilize support for
long-term business strategies. Instead, they have had to depend for
persuasion on the mass media, themselves starting to suffer from lower
viewing figures and declining circulation. Without adequate institutional
instruments, governing classes would struggle to regularize elite-mass
relations and project power downwards, or out into the country. Long before
the 2008 financial crisis, popular backing had grown fickle and fleeting;
electoral volatility, abstentionism and anti-incumbency were the new order
of the day. In the aftermath of the crisis, as bailouts and qe translated
into the famous K-shaped recovery - ballooning wealth of the asset rich,
hardship for the middling strata - such contradictions became a liability.
As votes for many governing parties cratered, the stage was set for the
entry of hyperpolitical forces.
Radicalized incoherence

Did asset-owners also undergo a repoliticization in the 2010s, in step with
the ferment from below? Yes, replies a report in the Harvard Business
Review: 'Almost everything about business today is political':

    'When Delta Airlines stopped offering discounts to nra members
following a 2018 school shooting in Florida, it was threatened with the
withdrawal of fuel subsidies in Georgia. When Disney spoke up on LGBTQ+
rights in Florida, it lost its special governance status and rights in the
state. When H&M voiced concerns about cotton sourcing and human rights in
China, its revenues in that country plummeted. When the Ukraine crisis
broke, McDonald's was forced to exit the business it had painstakingly
built in Russia over a 30-year period.'footnote8

The Harvard Business Review diagnoses the conundrum for American corporate
elites: inequalities of wealth and income have become more obvious,
generating differences of interest and opinion rapidly amplified on social
media, while the workplace has become 'a vehicle for socialization and
self-expression'. The report concludes: 'Choices that may have been
clear-cut in purely economic terms - such as what business to be in, where
to do business, whom to do business with, and even how to price goods or
hire and promote employees - can now easily become complicated by politics.'

The origins of such discursive radicalization of the C-suites at Delta and
Disney can be traced in part to the Democrats' bid to offer ideological
reparations for their handling of the financial crisis - famously
epitomized in Obama's boost to campus feminism with his 2011 'Dear
Colleague' letter about Title IX complaints, sent on the day he launched
his second presidential campaign, with US unemployment running at 15
million. The transmission of diversity policies from university to business
park was sped along by consultancies like McKinsey and incorporated in ESG
goals that began to take up significant space in company reports. Solidly
mainstream politicians followed suit; in 2020, Nancy Pelosi and Keir
Starmer had themselves photographed piously taking the knee. Liberalism's
rhetorical radicalization was naturally met by an equal and opposite
reaction from the conservative side. In Trump's first run, this sounded
more radical notes - 'American carnage!' - than Pollyannaish Democrat DEI.
But the culture-wars play-by-play is of less interest here than the fact of
elite ideological fracture, which such repoliticization served to intensify.

Another index is the increasing political polarity of American business
elites. CEOs traditionally acted as a reliable source of support for the
Republican Party, yet some 25 per cent of them are now registered
Democrats. The result is that 'individuals comprising one of the most
powerful interest groups - corporate elites - appear to be fracturing
ideologically and to some degree even switching sides.'footnote9 As Dylan
Riley noted in 2024:

    Historically, the two-party system split the working class between
Democrats and Republicans, with the resulting vertical blocs cemented by a
combination of promised concessions and personalist demagogy. Once in
power, though, the parties would typically jettison their electoral
programmes and tack toward the centre. But what has occurred in the most
recent period . . . are intra-party revolts on both the right and the left
. . . This creates a dangerous situation for the rulers in which they
cannot easily find a vehicle to re-establish equilibrium.footnote10

Together with the rise in elite factionalism comes pure individuation, as
in the billionaire activism - Kochs, Adelsons, Trump himself - that has
been a driving force in ruling-class polarization. As Herman Mark Schwartz
puts it: 'the strata of elites whose cooperation is necessary for making
the system run' now 'prioritize their own private interests at the expense
of their collective class interests.'footnote11

More than popular fury, elite incoherence is an understated variable in the
political hubbub of the past few years. On both sides of the Atlantic,
Western leaders are struggling - on the vertical plane - to win enough
popular support to stay in office, let alone to build an enduring coalition
with majoritarian buy-in. The Democrats' inability to translate their green
industrial strategy - promoting red-state provision of green-energy jobs -
into electoral victory in 2024 was only the latest indicator of how
difficult it is for elites to buy consent for their plans, amid voter
volatility and anti-system challengers on right and left.footnote12 On the
horizontal plane, meanwhile, the governing classes struggle to craft
cohesion between different fractions of capital and help asset owners
articulate interests across sectoral or geographic lines. This in turn
renders strategic coherence difficult - something evident in the
geo-economic tumult of the past year, from the tariff bonanza to the
destruction of Gulf oil-and-gas infrastructure and terrorization of the
low-wage migrant workforce. Rather than its cause, Trump the
hyperpolitician is a consequence of this elite disarticulation, providing
agency absent a stabilizing structural frame.

Europe's disarray

What Trump catalyses, of course, is more incoherence, as the contemporary
condition of Europe shows. Here, a set of pre-existing geopolitical and
economic dependencies makes elite fracture and cross-class bloc failure far
more disabling than in the us. Mainstream parties still hold power in
Europe's three largest countries, but their situation is precarious and - a
sign of the hyperpolitical mood of the electorates - their leaders are
deeply disliked. In Germany, Merz leads a directionless, ill-tempered
coalition which collectively won only 45 per cent of the vote; his personal
rating is on –64.footnote13 Though Germany is the de facto leader of the EU
bloc, its ruling elites cannot muster enough cohesion and popular backing
to relaunch their own export industries against Chinese competition and
American energy pressure, let alone craft a continental strategy. In
France, Macron's government has lacked the parliamentary support to pass a
budget since the legislative elections of 2024, where his coalition came
third in the first round, behind Mélenchon and Le Pen.footnote14 In
Britain, thanks to the first-past-the-post system and a right divided
between Tories and Reform, Starmer's Labour won a landslide of 411 seats
(of 650) in 2024, with a mandate from only 20 per cent of the overall
electorate, his popular vote down from Corbyn's in 2019.footnote15

This lack of vertical backing for European rulers is in part explained by
their inability to unite capitalist fractions behind a coherent strategy to
recharge their stagnant economies, trapped between the diktats of the bond
markets, a faltering Energiewende, regulatory burdens of the EU's
'compliance capitalism', the growing weight of social care for the elderly,
failing public infrastructure, unbeatably cheap Chinese manufacturing and
the crippling, self-inflicted gas-price shock resulting from their culpable
failure to structure and support a diplomatic answer to the Ukraine–Russia
question. Instead of directly grappling with these problems, Europe's
governing classes are issuing a call to arms against Russia and greedily
tallying the martial stock of poor war-torn Ukraine for the inventory of a
future EU army.

In their switch to intense Ukrainophilia - having long disdained the
country as a troublesome peripheral mendicant in need of harsh neo-imperial
financial discipline: viz., the 2013 eu–Ukraine association agreement -
otherwise bureaucratic figures like Merz and Starmer launch into the mode
of hyperpolitics, their energy and enthusiasm delinked from material and
political reality. Despite patent lack of popular support, their eagerness
for military spending swings from aircraft carriers and fighter jets to the
best possible intercontinental ballistic missiles, like an oligarch's
mistress comparing handbags or earrings. Yet they are no more capable of
forging a coherent continental rearmament strategy than a national economic
one. Paris insists such items should be Made in Europe, in other words, by
France's high-end aerospace companies; Berlin complains those firms go over
budget and take forty years to deliver; London, with its New
Labour-commissioned aircraft carrier permanently laid up for repairs, keeps
its fingers crossed that Washington will see it through.

The EU has no lack of coordinating institutions - Commission, Council,
Ecofin, Parliament, Trilogue System and so forth; not to mention the ECB
and ECJ - in which the mainstream parties' control of the system assures
them a consensual majority. What it does not have is a strategy that
European social blocs could recognize as representing their interests,
informed by - and propagated through - deep-rooted party formations. No
aggregator of that kind, capable of both articulating a coherent EU
business interest and constructing a popular base that would support it, is
in view. The consequences are plain to see. Instead of negotiating a
lasting peace with Russia that would respect Ukraine's self-determination,
the EU debate revolves - behind closed doors - around what credit system
its member states should use to arm against their great continental
neighbour. Accompanying this are sly attempts by each to stay in the
Pentagon's good books with logistics and supply for the Trump–Netanyahu war
of aggression against Iran, while posturing about a rules-based
international order.

The work of EU whisperer Luuk van Middelaar and his Brussels Institute for
Geopolitics (BIG) offers a telling illustration of this lurch into
hyperpolitical militarism. In the 2000s, Van Middelaar celebrated the EU's
'canny politics of depoliticization', which sublimated the continent's
history of internecine warfare into 'interminable negotiations over trade,
raw materials and farm subsidies.'footnote16 Today he appears as the Old
World's Elbridge Colby, helping European rulers regain a relish for power
while BIG readies them for a new era of geo-economics. Instead of a rigid
politics of rules, the EU's speciality, he urges it to pursue a
short-termist 'politics of events'. The institutional vehicle for this
would be a revamped European Defence Agency, the forum where national
defence officials can commune on a shared agenda. Van Middelaar would
upgrade it on the model of the Eurogroup, the conclave where Eurozone
finance ministers chose a primus inter pares to guide their confidential
discussions during the Eurozone crisis, under Wolfgang Schäuble's watchful
eye.

The analogy is a revealing one. The Eurogroup exemplified the governing
classes' retreat from democratic engagement and was roundly attacked during
the crisis as an opaque elite club, lacking any accountability or public
scrutiny, where ministers deliberated, in an atmosphere of informal
conviviality, on budget cuts which condemned millions of EU citizens to
unemployment or destitution. In big's blueprint, the eda would assist in
preparing the same citizens for war, through 'intellectual rearmament' as
much as military bookkeeping. Opinion polls may report backing for great
'strategic autonomy', but Europe's electorates have hardly mandated their
leaders to rush into a continental arms race. Van Middelaar's instant
politics offers a mirror of the incoherence of European thinking -
rearmament on American terms, here dressed in sovereigntist garb. It is
symptomatic of the lack of a cohesive perspective through which European
elites might transcend national and sectoral divides and achieve some
agency in the new Trumpian universe.

Hyperpolitics in office

If this is roughly the structural background of elite hyperpolitics -
repoliticization, under conditions of a fracturing ruling class - what is
the political form of Trumpism 2.0? During his first term, Trump struggled
to find his feet in the White House. Astonished by his victory, frightened
by the remit of the Special Counsel's investigation, hemmed in by officials
who would give evidence for his impeachment, subject to leaks from the Oval
Office, his presence was largely dysfunctional.footnote17 Once ejected from
it, he was free to plan, and a team of loyalists (Miller, Vought, Wiles)
worked out how to use the levers of power. January 2025 arguably initiated
a new era wherein, for the first time, a hyperpolitical oppositionist
entered office equipped with the means to manage the executive apparatus.
Trump's hyperpolitics in office thus involves a hybrid formation: an
unstable compound of the typical Trumpian theatrics - an old-fashioned
showman of the Fox News era, combining a protean political identity (Huey
Long to Emperor Nero) and a skilful pivot to social media - with the
bureaucratic rationality of the Armed Forces and Homeland Security. The
admixture is hardly chemically pure. Moreover, it now extends the mode of
hyperpolitics onto the terrain of foreign policy; a hyper-geopolitics, if
you will.

Others have investigated the concrete outcomes of Trump's second term to
date.footnote18 The remit here is to register what it indicates - beyond
the purée of right-wing policies cooked up by the Heritage Foundation - as
a modality of rule. The most salient feature is surely its politique
événementielle - in van Middelaar's coinage, 'a politics of events'. If the
nation-state typically takes the long- or medium-term as its yardstick,
Trump has instead presided over a radical contraction of political time. As
Ivan Krastev has noted:

    The essence of the Trumpian revolution is . . . the implosion of time
itself. Trump shows no interest in anything that has happened before him
and is unconcerned with what will transpire after him. He acts as if
history must come to a screeching halt when he exits the stage. This helps
explain why he believes that all wars should be stopped in weeks, if not
days. Trump's experience of time is central to his political behaviour. The
president doesn't think in terms of long-term strategy but rather in terms
of deadlines. He's like a director who does not shoot films but only
trailers for movies that will never be made . . . . Trump's revolutionary
sense of time, in the absence of any revolutionary project, is a source of
both strength and vulnerability. He weaponizes the public's growing sense
of urgency. The existential anxiety that 'there is no time' forestalls the
question: 'Time for what?'footnote19

What if one were to explain this short-termism as a structural product and
not just a personal quirk? As Jonathan White has noted, the disappearance
of cross-class institutions in the post-political 1990s has also made it
harder for elites to conceive of a shared future which would guarantee grip
over a present open to alteration; the mass party had been 'a necessary
vehicle to mediate between futures near and far, between what is currently
achievable and what is ultimately desirable.'footnote20 In a similar vein,
Avner Offer has suggested that the blurring of the public-private divide
has fused the older timeline of state policy with the instantaneous cycles
of private markets.footnote21 An increasing unplannability, or incapacity
to gather elites around a long-term project, is one of its most visible
symptoms. This is indeed a politics purely of events, whose primary concern
is the impact any decision may have on the American media cycle - the
revenge of Baudrillard's vision of US politics as permanent spectacle.

Two compounding consequences of this décalage deserve attention. First, the
reading proposed does not imply elite control over the social surplus has
somehow diminished; there are good grounds to say it has
increased.footnote22 Yet the political unmooring of Western elites has
widened the gaps between different fractions of capital and made long-term
planning across them more difficult. Hence Krastev's wonder over Trump's
'revolutionary sense of temporality' - an actor who has mercilessly seized
on the apertures left by vanishing elite integrators, whose smash-and-grab
politics at least promises direct gain. As the model hyperpolitician, Trump
seems to offer easy rewards in the sordid struggle over rents.

Secondly, elite deracination also implies a fractious chain of command
between leaders and their capitalist constituencies. Trump has indeed
managed to gather a select but robust subsection of American capital under
his wing - fossil industries, higher ends of private equity, exurban middle
management - along with some sections of an 'uncredentialled'
post-industrial working class. In a typical distributional skew, rising oil
prices might have beneficial effects for some of the monied constituencies
in the Trump coalition. Yet they are hardly the controlling actors; neither
the abduction of Maduro nor l'affaire Greenland seem to have found direct
support amongst them. While Trump himself loudly proclaimed the Venezuelan
coup an oil grab, American petroleum executives were by no means keen on an
intervention which would increase global supply. Given the hyperpolitical
tremor, it is unclear how stable and lasting Trump's cross-class coalition
can be. Its fragility is already visible in the plummeting approval ratings
that have accompanied his debacle in Iran. A politics of mole-whacking
crises and headline grabbing, rather than elite planning, is its correlate.

How much of all this will prove ephemeral, as the hyperpolitics diagnosis
would predict? Trump is famously uninterested in legislation. Tellingly,
many of his most oxygen-sucking domestic policies to date have already been
dialled back. DOGE has been wound up and Federal re-hiring begun. Most of
the tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court and repayment is under
way. Hundreds of executive orders are stymied in the courts. Ostentatious
cruelty remains a signal feature: though the ICE invasion of cities was
brought back to levels of brutality not so far from Obama's, the gulag of
detention centres across the South is spreading. Hyper-geopolitics will
undoubtedly leave its mark; Trump's backing for the Israeli agenda of
regional carnage has inflicted a trail of death and destruction from Gaza
to Lebanon, Yemen and Iran. Looting Venezuela, starving Cuba, fuelling the
Russia–Ukraine war he pledged to stop; how far this departs from US
business as usual will be a matter for future historians to decide.

Hyper-stability?

The discoordination of the Atlantic ruling classes finds its photographic
negative in the stability of their Chinese counterpart. Over the past
decade, the ccp has if anything increased its hold over China's state and
society - an intensification of the 'party-state'.footnote23 It has thereby
sired a successor to the 'depoliticized politics' which Wang Hui saw as the
rule for both East and West in the 1990s and 2000s.footnote24 Xi's China
presents a new, distinctly twenty-first-century genre of party politics,
neither Maoist nor Dengist - and visibly different from the hyperpolitics
preponderant in the West.

The economic consequences of this institutionalism are now on spectacular
display. Given the decentralized nature of the Chinese state, with
regulatory signals sent from Beijing to the provinces, it could be said to
constitute a European Union that works. Hence a striking ellipsis in much
recent discussion on 'abundance' in the us: jealous admiration for the
achievements of the Chinese engineering state against the us's lawyerly
society, yet no mention of the organ that assures these
achievements.footnote25 The aporetic silence is not surprising. If Ezra
Klein and Derek Thompson are serious about rekindling American supply-side
progressivism, or EU whisperers want to maintain the continent's standing,
they should at least think about what Washington and Brussels's answer to
the ccp's new party-state would look like - not a ministry masquerading as
a party, or the clannish office politics of the Commission.

It is hard to see the green developmental surge of the last ten years as
separate from the ccp's stranglehold over Chinese society, which has
enabled it to stave off both populism and hyperpolitics à la chinoise. In
particular after covid, the party has reinserted itself into every level of
the Chinese polity, re-establishing itself as a regulator for elite-mass
relations - whether through repression, surveillance or economic buy-out -
and an instrument of cohesion for different elite factions, whose
biographies are intimately tied to the party. That the ccp's Five Year Plan
may now be a better indicator of world macro-economic prospects than policy
briefs from Brussels or Washington is a telling sign of the
divergence.footnote26

Under capitalism, political cultures are anything but static. Some analysts
may detect signs of a new bifurcation in the commitment to modest but
achievable goals - hypo-policies? - of the Mamdani-mayoralty or the
psoe–Sumar foreign policy in Spain. Tech suzerain Peter Thiel has already
evinced nostalgia for the post-political era: Americans are increasingly
'looking to politics to solve problems', with a 'relentless intensification
of politics' as consequence, he bemoaned. Instead, 'it would be healthy if
we had elections in which fewer people voted.'footnote27 His concern is
understandable. In the us, hyperpolitics acts as a solvent of elite
stability; in Europe, it deepens the fractures of which it is a symptom.
Barring coherent re-institutionalization at either the top or bottom of
society, however, elegies for the hyperpolitical era will prove premature.


1 Andrew England, Vita Ghaffari and Steff Chávez, 'Trump Praises “Very
Good” Talks with Iran But Warns of “Steep” Consequences', Financial Times,
6 February 2026; Trump, Truth Social, 7 April 2026.
2 Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political
Consequences, London and New York 2026; Jäger and Arthur Borriello, The
Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession, London and New York
2023. The initial protests from 2010 onwards were often anti-political, at
least in the anarchistic sense: Occupy Wall Street issued no demands; the
15M movement in Spain banned political parties from the liberated squares;
the great cry of the Arab Spring was simply for the downfall of the regime.
3 Klaus Dörre, Die demobilisierte Klassengesellschaft: Begriffe, Theorie,
Analysen, Politik, Weinheim 2026.
4 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, London
and New York 2013. See also 'Ruling the Void', nlr 42, Nov–Dec 2006:
average turnouts in Western Europe fell steadily, from 84.3 per cent in the
1950s to 77.6 per cent in the 1990s; turnout in many countries has now
dropped below 65 per cent.
5 Mair, Ruling the Void, p. 98.
6 Mair, Ruling the Void, pp. 140–41.
7 Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and
Deliberative Politics, Cambridge 2023.
8 Roger Martin and Martin Reeves, 'Strategy in a Hyper-Political World',
Harvard Business Review, Nov–Dec 2022.
9 Reilly Steel, 'The Political Transformation of Corporate America,
2001–22', American Political Science Review, vol. 120, no. 2, May 2026.
10 Dylan Riley, 'Bonapartist Solutions', nlr–Sidecar, 15 March 2024.
11 Herman Mark Schwartz, 'Empire Suicide Watch', Phenomenal World, no. 1,
June 2026.
12 Alexander Gazmararian, Nathan Jensen and Dustin Tingley, 'Why Biden-Era
Clean Energy Investment Policies Had Limited Political Returns',
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 123, no. 9, March
2026.
13 In the 2025 frg elections, the cdu/csu won 28.5 per cent, spd 16.4 per
cent. For Merz's approval rating, see Matthew Smith, 'How Popular Are
National Leaders in Europe? May 2026', YouGov, 8 June 2026. For analysis,
see Wolfgang Streeck, 'The Road Right', nlr 152, March–April 2025.
14 In the July 2024 legislative elections, Macron's er won 21 per cent of
the vote, behind Mélenchon's New Popular Front (28 per cent) and Le Pen's
rn and allies (33 per cent). For a diagnosis, see Nathan Sperber, 'The
French Crisis: Organic or Conjunctural?', nlr 148, July–Aug 2024.
15 See Tom Hazeldine, 'Neo-Labourism in the Saddle', nlr 148, July–Aug
2024. Authoritarian and penny-pinching, Starmer soon became deeply
unpopular and was ousted by his own mps within two years of his win, to be
replaced by a near replica, Andy Burnham, at the time of writing.
16 Perry Anderson, Ever-Closer Union?: Europe in the West, London and New
York 2021.
17 Dylan Riley, 'What Is Trump?', nlr 114, Nov–Dec 2018.
18 See Alexander Zevin, 'Trump's Gulf War', nlr 158, March–April 2026;
Susan Watkins, 'Trump Abroad' and Ervand Abrahamian, 'Iran Under Fire', nlr
157, Jan–Feb 2026; Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner, 'The Long Downturn and
Its Political Results', nlr 155, Sept–Oct 2025; Tariq Ali, 'Conquered
Lands', nlr 151, Jan–Feb 2025.
19 Ivan Krastev, 'Trump's Revolutionary Sense of Time Is Changing
Politics', Financial Times, 11 March 2026.
20 Jonathan White, In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea, London
2025.
21 Avner Offer, Understanding the Private–Public Divide: Markets,
Governments and Time Horizons, Cambridge 2022.
22 As Nausicaa Renner recently posited of the gop: ' Party and Class ', nlr
157, Jan–Feb 2026.
23 Nathan Sperber, 'Party and State in China', nlr 142, July–Aug 2023.
24 Wang Hui, 'Depoliticized Politics, from East to West', nlr 41, Sept–Oct
2006.
25 See, for example: Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the
Future, New York 2025; Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance, New York
2025.
26 As Adam Tooze recently noted: 'The simultaneity of this grotesque [Iran]
war on the one hand with the kind of relentless rationalism of the cpc
regime in China struck me as I was doomscrolling news from the war on a
corner of Fifth Avenue and realized that I was, at the same time, waiting
for updates from the Twin Sessions meetings in Beijing, the central
political event of the Chinese regime': Natasha Lennard and Adam Tooze, 'A
Staggering Reversal of Assumptions', Public Seminar, 10 June 2026.
27 Sean Fischer, 'Peter Thiel: Capitalism Isn't Working for Young People',
Free Press, 7 November 2025.
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