A Grin Without a Stat

A review of Anton Jäger’s “Hyperpolitics”

I began this review for a magazine, but it took me so long to finish it that they didn’t want it anymore. I’ve finally finished it, and I hope it still provides some insight without the assistance of an editor.

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“A week is a long time in politics,” Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson is reputed to have said, supplying us with one of the great political clichés. If a week was a long time in the middle of the 1960s, it’s a positive eternity today. Politics, mediated through the internet, appears as a wild froth of frenetic activity. Public outrage and hysteria can seize millions in a matter of hours and then be promptly forgotten. We feel that at any moment, society itself may dissolve, with online fantasy giving way to violent realization. And yet, though we teeter on the edge, the final lurch into the abyss never seems to arrive. Waves of distemper sometimes burst onto the street, but ebb away just as rapidly. There’s a sense of stasis, stuckness, and futility. Cycles of public outrage burn out before turning into a general conflagration. It feels like a time of great social change, but our politics moves in fits and starts. As Kierkegaard wrote of the present age, the public “flies into enthusiasm for a moment only to decline back into indolence.”

It’s to this sense of simultaneous frenzied activity and passive nullity that Anton Jäger’s book Hyperpolitics addresses itself. Jäger is an intellectual historian, a lecturer at Oxford, and a prolific contributor to the magazines of the Anglophone left—New Left Review, Jacobin, The Point, Damage. Hyperpolitics is stitched together from magazine articles submitted to these publications. The acknowledgments are disarmingly candid about its origins: The project began with what Jäger calls a “furtive tweet.” “Most of the chapters were commissioned by friends,” Jäger writes, before adding that his editor Thomas Meaney “insisted that the pieces in question did, in fact, add up to a book.” Perhaps.

The thesis feels plausible and even convincing. Jäger proposes a four-stage periodization of modern politics: mass politics (1914–1989), characterised by high mobilization within dense institutional structures — parties, unions, churches, pillarised civil societies; postpolitics (1989–2008), the privatized quietude of the long 1990s, in which citizens retreated from public life and technocrats governed by neoliberal consensus; antipolitics (the 2010s), when the financial crisis shattered postpolitical complacency and populist movements like the Tea Party, Occupy, and Syriza erupted from the rubble; and finally hyperpolitics, the condition of the present, in which “everything is political” but nothing is institutionally anchored. Jäger writes, Hyperpolitics is “low-commitment, low-cost, and all too often, low-value.”

Hyperpolitics might be handily characterized as politics with ADHD: hyper activity, low sustained focus. It is not “the strong and slow boring of hard boards” as Max Weber characterized the vocation of politics at the dawn of the mass political era. This diffusion of political energy throughout the system has a material basis if you follow Jäger’s historical sequence: deindustrialization leads to the decline of mass parties and associational life, then comes the demobilization and depoliticization of the post-politics era, then political agitation returns with the 2008 crisis, but the old institutions that could turn those political programs and desires into tangible gains no longer exist. Instead of a robust civil society, there is the internet, atomized, fragmentary and labile.

Trying to sum up an era with a single abstraction is immensely difficult at great historical remove, never mind from within the heat of events. The concept of hyperpolitics is certainly describing a real phenomenon. But the question is whether it is the phenomenon: the overriding pattern of modern politics. Jäger shies away from staking out that kind of claim for his concept. “Hyperpolitics denotes a tendency rather than a totalizing style. Nevertheless, this book argues that it constitutes a gravitational pole in the force field of twenty-first-century politics,” he writes. Fair enough!

The question is how strong that gravitational pull really is. A look at a few empirical episodes provides mixed results. The explosion after the murder of George Floyd seems to confirm Jäger’s thesis most clearly. Enormous protests followed, but few lasting mass organizations emerged, and the political impulses that they generated were defeated. But what of more recent events? Jäger admits that the right might have an edge in renewing or sustaining civic life. Still, he does not closely examine organizations like Turning Point USA or the Faith and Freedom Coalition. The latter group, chaired by a veteran of conservative causes, Ralph Reed, claims in 2024 it made 78 million voter contacts, conducted 10 million home visits, engaged 13,000 churches, and distributed millions of voter guides. Even if we discount some of this as exaggeration, Faith & Freedom can’t be dismissed as a mere inflated mailing list. During the 2024 election, the Washington Post described it as spending tens of millions of dollars on evangelical voter mobilization and reported a national field plan involving thousands of paid canvassers and volunteers. This is not a holdover from the 20th century: this is a post-2008 group.

This all points to a major blind spot in Jäger’s analysis of American civil society: the church. The word “evangelical” only appears once in the (frankly somewhat hackneyed) invocation of “megachurches.” In both 2016 and 2020, Trump picked up about 80% of the white evangelical vote. In general, Trump won over white Americans who regularly attend worship services, 59% to 40%. Civil society decline might be a broader context for understanding American politics, but Trump’s constituency is not mainly drawn from the atomized and lonely crowd, but from people who are well integrated into the remaining structures of American communal life. One 2021 paper showed that Trump did best in 2020 in areas that had a combination of remaining high social capital and economic decline. The image of Trump as Napoleon III, the chief of the atomized peasantry as a “sack of potatoes” that Jäger is fond of invoking, is clever but not quite right.

Before Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September 2025, TPUSA was already a substantial organization, not merely a social-media or radio audience. It claimed ot have reached more than 2,300 high-school and college campuses. The organization had a national field structure, formal chapter charters, field representatives, campus tours, conferences, and a large media operation. In 2024, its campus tour hit more than 30 schools, with reported crowds of 2,000+ at Oklahoma State, 2,250+ at Florida State, and 5,250+ at Texas A&M.

Post-assassination, we get a mixed picture that confirms but also complicates a hyperpolitical interpretation. On the one hand, the hue and cry, the possibility of mass mobilization, the threatening “Reichstag fire” moment, dissipated quickly. Notch one for hyperpolitics. But there were some apparently durable effects: TPUSA did grow its organization. By September 2026, Reuters reported more than 3,500 high-school chapters and 1,500 college chapters, albeit amid a broader collapse of Trump among young voters. And the vaunted “vibe shift,” the putative cultural shift that America went through, was the example par excellence: evanescent and ephemeral, it put the “hype” in hyperpolitics. But on the balance, here is a case where the churn dissipates, and some organizational density does remain; Not exactly what a hyperpolitical perspective would predict.

On the left, there are real signs of non-hyperpolitical developments as well. Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral campaign built a durable citywide canvassing apparatus that DSA subsequently reused in other races—and this was on top of DSA’s existing infrastructure. The Palestine movement wasn’t without consequences, either: public opinion in the US has shifted radically on the question of Israel-Palestine with real electoral results. Is that just the horrific images on the news and social media, or is that the work of the activists? Hard to say at this point, but it does not fit the hyperpolitical pattern of much ado and then nothing. And, finally, in Minneapolis in 2026, resistance to the federal immigration crackdown drew on unions, churches, immigrant organizations, teachers, and community groups capable of coordinating action well beyond the lifespan of any single viral campaign. The point is that media hype might not reveal—or might even conceal—some durable organizational activity.

There are a few ways to approach these empirical mismatches. One thought is that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and we are already exiting the “hyperpolitical era.” Less charitably, hyperpolitics might be picking up on and over-theorizing an epiphenomenon rather than an essential relation of social forces. It could be that’s the way the world appears to the terminally online—a succession of hysterias, micro-scandals, and fads—but it misses what’s underlying all the political decomposition and recomposition. It gives us a phenomenology of contemporary politics, but not a logic. A book that did that couldn’t be so short or so sexy: it would have to look in great detail at why there is this uneven and combined development of civil society.

I have to say, also, that I get next to nothing from the discussions of Wolfgang Tillmans and Michel Houellebecq. Those parts seemed more an effort to situate the book on an avant-garde cultural terrain than anything enlightening. To briefly judge a book by its cover, the photo and design give it the consumption character of a hip objet d’art for the urban pad. This points to another major weakness, which is that of tone, aesthetics, and judgment: there is a frisson of a sour and sneering nihilism at work. Hyperpolitics comes out of the Baudrillardian tradition, if you can call it that, where politics mainly appears as spectacle, simulacrum, and gesture. The danger is that this can mistake style and sensibility for explanation. From this perspective, everything starts to be poisoned by irony, exhaustion, and presumed bad faith. All militancy is just make-believe; all enthusiasms, Schwärmerei; all commitment, mere posturing. Political disappointment confirms in advance that nothing much could have happened anyway. The critic acquires the enviable position of being too disabused to ever be really surprised. Nothing ever happens, as the meme goes.

This can be a poor standpoint from which to understand political development. The fact of the matter is politics is full of failure, ugliness, naivety, vulgarity, and compromise. “From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step,” as one who knew politics very well once said. A pose of aesthetic acuity can become political stupidity when its main concern is avoiding embarrassment. The sneer provides a comforting retrospective superiority because the participants are always more credulous than the observer. An affected remove can provide less a sense of disinterest than that of hauteur and betrays a sentimentality of its own. Jäger’s cultivated irony toward the present, as welcome and witty as it sometimes can be, comes from an attachment to the past. “Hyperpolitics” appears trivial because it is measured against an idealized image of mass politics that hard historical research may show never really existed. It may be less a conceptualization than a series of nostalgic snapshots. At its best, I do believe the concept of hyperpolitics can help us to get our bearings and separate what’s essential from the accidental in contemporary politics and society. The book does contain moments of real, valuable intellectual labor towards understanding the world. But at its worst, Hyperpolitics might just make you feel cool for knowing it all comes out to nothing anyway.