Re: <nettime> Anton J/ger/s Hyperpolitics

[Louis Rawlins via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Hey Brian.

Highly recommend adding Aaron Benanav to the mix, if you're looking for
perspectives that point towards solutions, or even caveats to how we
organize.

I especially found value (still find value) from "Automation and the Future
of Work"

Peace,  Louis


------------------------------
louisrawlins.com
248-808-8908


On Tue, Aug 25, 2026 at 11:55 AM <nettime-l-request@lists.nettime.org>
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>    1. Re: Anton J?ger?s Hyperpolitics (Brian Holmes)
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> Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:54:00 -0500
> From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
> To: "<nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
>         collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets"
>         <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>
> Subject: Re: <nettime> Anton J?ger?s Hyperpolitics
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> 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 J?ger
> 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 D?rre 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 M?lenchon 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 Sch?uble'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 pur?e of right-wing policies cooked up by the Heritage Foundation - as
> a modality of rule. The most salient feature is surely its politique
> ?v?nementielle - 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 d?calage 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 ? 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 Ch?vez, '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 J?ger, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political
> Consequences, London and New York 2026; J?ger 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 D?rre, 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 J?rgen 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 M?lenchon'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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