How the World Went from Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics

February 3, 2022 2:29 PM

Those that were politicised by the era marked by the Financial Crash will remember when nothing, not even the austerity policies imposed in its wake, could be described as political. Today, everything is politics. And yet, despite people being intensely politicised in all of these dimensions, very few are involved in the kind of organised conflict of interests that we might once have described as politics in the classical, twentieth-century sense.
posted by chappell, ambrose (18 comments total)

Drawing on Anton Jäger’s Tribune article, John Ganz’s related idea is The Era of Ideological Warlords
posted by chappell, ambrose at 2:31 PM on February 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

No, what happened is that people who had always been able to ignore the political nature of reality have been forced to learn the hard way that everything is political. If you were not the sort of person centered in the status quo, it became abundantly clear that your very existence was a political matter just from what you had to do to live.

What's happening now is that as those who have traditionally not been part of that status quo have gained power and clout, it's now opened that status quo to change, and those who relied on the status quo to set the baseline are now finding that they have to fight for it where they never had to before.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:55 PM on February 3, 2022 [43 favorites]

Everything has always been political.

The only people who don't believe that are the people whom the politics has historically generally benefited.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 4:01 PM on February 3, 2022 [29 favorites]

The long 90s allowed a lot of people to coast without developing a sense of politics. That doesn’t mean that politics didn’t happen.
posted by The River Ivel at 4:11 PM on February 3, 2022 [12 favorites]

When I hear someone saying “things are too political” it’s nearly always coming from someone for whom the society they live in is set up for their benefit, and for whom things, in general, work.

But past that, it’s nearly always coming from someone with a stunning inability to give a shit about people they don’t resemble, for people the system is not set up to serve. People (charitably) who have limited experience with people of other races, religion, or sexuality, or (uncharitably) assholes who harbor intense dislike for people who don’t resemble them. Those that cling to “stop making everything political” as their closest expression of politics show, in nearly every action, ever word, that the concept of empathy is a foreign one.

These people are the ones who claim any attempt towards expanding the rights, freedoms, and benefits they enjoy towards others is going to take away everything they’ve worked for, when, in most cases, the only work they’ve ever done is being born the right color, the right gender, at the right time. Their existence, the benefits they receive, their utterly unexamined life of privilege is intensely political, but god help you if you try to point out that there is no good reason for it to belong solely to them.

If the system only works for one group, excluding others, then the system is broken. If a thing is broken, everything that comes next is a choice: fixing it is a choice, replacing it with a different system is a choice, and clinging to the shards that still give you some benefit is a goddamn choice.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:23 PM on February 3, 2022 [31 favorites]

The article isn’t really about whether or not everything was/is always political. It’s about how the decline of collective institutions like unions and political parties has made today’s mass politics significantly different from the 20th century. It’s a good article, I recommend reading it.
posted by thedamnbees at 4:44 PM on February 3, 2022 [36 favorites]

The article is about the decline of mass organized politics, even as people are putting politics front and center in much of their personal life. It seems especially to be focused in Europe, where I think core party membership was historically an important force that it wasn't here in the US. But I'd love to hear European perspectives.

It seems related to the "following politics is a hobby" argument I've seen going around recently. The point isn't that politics is unimportant, it's an argument that it's too important to view as a sort of individual consumer choice and needs engagement, not commentary from the peanut galley. I'm definitely deserving of criticism on that front.

TFA ties this to a sort of McKinseyism among the organizations themselves, as what were large organizations becomes shells staffed by "PR specialists and functionaries":

Unsurprisingly, the Starmerite counter-revolution inside the Labour Party has focused on targeting members and their powers: if it is to be made into another vehicle for professional politics, members must be disempowered, incentivised to leave, or outright expelled. With over 150,000 already departed, that process is well underway.

Or about the public:

An age of changing employment contracts and growing self-employment does not stimulate long and lasting bonds within organisations. In its place comes a curious combination of the horizontal and the hierarchical, with leaders who manage a loose group of zealots without ever subscribing to a clear party framework.

I'm not sure how much I'm going to end up buying into on the framing, but I think it's an interesting article.
posted by mark k at 5:07 PM on February 3, 2022 [5 favorites]

The article isn’t really about whether or not everything was/is always political. It’s about how the decline of collective institutions like unions and political parties has made today’s mass politics significantly different from the 20th century. It’s a good article, I recommend reading it.

The central thesis is literally:

"Those that were politicised by the era marked by the Financial Crash will remember when nothing, not even the austerity policies imposed in its wake, could be described as political. Today, everything is politics. And yet, despite people being intensely politicised in all of these dimensions, very few are involved in the kind of organised conflict of interests that we might once have described as politics in the classical, twentieth-century sense."

I think the point is that the current surge in political activity has not gone down the historical route of structured political action, but the author clearly believes in an utterly imaginary era of non-politics.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 6:20 PM on February 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

A new form of ‘politics’ is present on the football pitch, in the most popular Netflix shows, in the ways people describe themselves on their social media pages. To many on the right, society now feels overtaken by a permanent Dreyfus Affair, cleaving family dinners, friends’ drinks, and workplace lunches. To many on the centre, it has created a longing for an era before this hyper-politics, ‘a nostalgia for post-history’ in the 1990s and 2000s, when markets and technocrats were exclusively in charge of policy.

Like, sport being political is not new. People protested the 1936 Olympics for being held in Nazi Germany. Smith and Carlos (and Norman) did their Black Power salute in 1968 at the Mexico City Olympics.

To be honest, sports is not my milieu, but media is.

Netflix didn't bring about politics in film and television. Art has always been political, even commercial art. The decision to only make film and television featuring white people is political. The decision to write romantic relationships between a 55 year old man and a 25 year old woman is political. The decision to only write male protagonists is political. These tropes were extremely common during the 'post politics' era the author proposes. It's just silly to propose otherwise. Now that these things are changing, doesn't make those changes 'political' or the art forms 'more' political. It merely means you're seeing more diversity in the politics.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 6:34 PM on February 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

That one side has managed to develop a tribal identity completely unmoored from facts and logic strikes me as good evidence that politics is indeed “over” — at least in terms of providing a somewhat legitimate adjudication among competing societal principles.

By the “rules” of late 20th century politics, the game really is over — there’s no real question about where people stand ideologically, they favor labor-friendly capitalism and secular pro-social culture.

I think this was clear in the 90s and is what gave rise to the notion of the “end of politics.” What people failed to understand is that often ideology follows political identity, and political movements don’t necessarily wink out just because they aren’t logically robust.

So now we’re back in an era of politics as bare knuckle exercise of power, and I guess you can mock the people who thought it could ever be more than that, but I’d like to dare for something better than a crapsack world.
posted by bjrubble at 7:16 PM on February 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think the good people who were members of ACT-UP in the 1990s would like to have a word about this entire subject.

But perhaps ACT-UP is exactly the kind of political movement outside of traditional structures that this article is addressing. I don't know. The AIDS crisis was a horrifically political time for a lot of people while it was basically invisible to most.
posted by hippybear at 7:25 PM on February 3, 2022 [8 favorites]

There are broad systemic forces at work but we can also single out two debauched media institutions warping minds at a history-altering scale in the form of Fox News and Facebook. Their designers have names and addresses.
posted by moorooka at 7:30 PM on February 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

The term 'post-political' does not mean that politics literally did not exist. It refers to a broad neoliberal consensus that emerged after the cold war. One way think of it in the UK and the US, is the way neoliberalism began with the right wing Reagan and Thatcher in the eighties, but was adopted by the ostensibly left wing Clinton and Blair in the nineties. The term refers to the ruling ideology of the era, and using the term is not an endorsement of that ideology.
posted by thedamnbees at 7:59 PM on February 3, 2022 [10 favorites]

Questions of what people own and control are increasingly replaced by questions of who or what people are, replacing the clash of classes with the collaging of identities.

I see this as huge and ever present. I see this with people are fairly ideologically aligned with me but who are less practiced at seeing structure. "I saw good news, X rich person who is politically left is doing a good thing with their money." Like ok, but we should be deciding what happens to that money. NOT hoping we get lucky with rich people developing consciousness. One thing that comes to mind is Mackenzie Scott's charity work. She's donating huge amounts of money, great. She decided to do some in secret because her big gifts were generating unwanted attention for the recipients. Then people complained because of lack of transparency. Thus revealing the problem with the whole scheme: it's our resources, we should be deciding how to allocate it through the transparency of government structure. Instead we are arguing about the rightness of one person's choices while always having to reiterate how good it is that one rich person is doing something somewhat right. It's somehow "mean" to point out that this person should never be in this role in the first place, not matter how personally nice she is.

The collaging of identities is a great way to talk about this. Some of the well-meaning liberals I know were quite excited when Merrick Garland was nominated to Attorney General. I literally don't care about this man. I get no personal satisfaction from this supposed show of comeuppance to Mitch McConnell. I want somebody incredibly tough and unyielding for righteousness and I see no evidence that Garland is that person. But when you identify yourself as a team member here, it is easier to celebrate. This is supposed to be a win for "my" team. When in fact it's like being a fan of an NFL franchise. I pay for the stadium, I endure the traffic snarls and lack of access to my own city on Game Day, and if I want any representation of my part on this team I'll be paying my own dollars for it. Meanwhile if I were to get within speaking distance of the team owners, security will haul me off.

Sorry to get very US centric, I realize this article is not specifically about the United States.
posted by Emmy Rae at 8:36 PM on February 3, 2022 [12 favorites]

I think it is useful to understand where Anton is coming from personally here. He's a "classic" socialist i.e. very much not a liberal but also not a part of the "new left" which has strong ideological roots in anarchist thought. So he would agree that "everything is political" but as an old school Marxist that mostly means power relationships to him.

From that perspective, the post 1990 era (maybe even everything after Thatcher/Reagan in the Anglosphere) is post-political because even though political parties continued and continue to exist, they're not contending over big questions of how power should be allocated within society but auditioning to be the most competent administrators of a consensus neoliberal system where real decisions don't really get made - big questions have all been settled by economic "science" (i.e. we get to pretend that they weren't even decisions, just inevitabilities), technocrats administer a relatively fixed system, and politicians win on third way platforms of centrist competence.

I previously paraphrased his idea of hyper-politics as "everyone is furious all the time but nothing ever happens". His idea basically is that in the absence of institutions with a high degree of "stickyness", anger is never translated into sustained mobilisation. I guess my challenge is that depending on how you look at it, this isn't that new. I think of the French 1968 movement, its European counterparts, and the American equivalent as not actually that different from the anti-WTO/Occupy movements more recently - consumer and individually focused, placing a premium on individual identity rather than big tent worker solidarity and the nursery for a generation of political figures who are very proud of having taken part in a movement that actually achieved nothing. Notable exceptions such as the American Civil Rights movement are maybe the exceptions that prove the rule because they were none of those things, maintained disciplined and effective leadership and mobilisation for an extended period of time and made genuine gains. I don't really know whether BLM will turn out to be more like the former or the latter.

As for post-post-politics, I see nothing in the pre-2007 period that looks like "post-politics" or all that different from what the author describes in the present. The anti-globalization mobilizations were also horizontal in the way described (and inspired a lot of Occupiers, not least Graeber). The anti-war efforts in the Bush era were more or less leaderless, too, in my experience. And the autonomous groups carrying out political violence against black folks (e.g. James Byrd's murderers) and sexual minorities (Matthew Shepard), like those in riots in L.A., exhibit the same kind of horizontality described in the piece. All of that was political, and people knew it at the time. Same goes for the decades prior.

The big dividing point on the "left" is whether leaderless movements like Occupy (or BLM) that don't develop traditional enduring party structures are the future of politics or whether the lack of structure means that they can never capture enough enduring power to change things in a meaningful way.

There is a little bit of "old marxist yells at cloud" about the idea that these darn young people just won't join the party and do what they're told. Anton is unusual I think in that, generationally, a lot of the younger left is very much behind these movements and thinks that this is how they'll win in the future.

I think the truth is that we don't really know but really neither Occupy nor traditional party structures like the DSA (to use American examples) nor anyone else has taken nor used any effective political power in practice so maybe neither work now?

It's interesting though the number of people who have correctly self-diagnosed (and I think that's the right word, it's not healthy) as being hyper-online that I see on this site and other places who are completely overwhelmed with horror and anxiety over the "the way things are going" but aren't actually politically engaged in a traditional sense of party membership and local activism. I symphathise with that, for a lot of Americans/British what happened around Bernie/Corbyn was pretty demoralising but my view is that if you're going to stop engaging in active politics, you should also stop obsessively reading and thinking about it since you're just going to drive yourself completely mad for no concrete material outcome. (and if you're Dutch then you probably don't even remember the last time you really believed that a political party you supported had even a sniff of real power but I'll stick to the Anglo examples for the MeFi audience).
posted by atrazine at 4:24 AM on February 4, 2022 [23 favorites]

Thanks for the context atrazine, flagged as fantastic.

From that perspective, the post 1990 era (maybe even everything after Thatcher/Reagan in the Anglosphere) is post-political because even though political parties continued and continue to exist, they're not contending over big questions of how power should be allocated within society but auditioning to be the most competent administrators of a consensus neoliberal system where real decisions don't really get made - big questions have all been settled by economic "science" (i.e. we get to pretend that they weren't even decisions, just inevitabilities), technocrats administer a relatively fixed system, and politicians win on third way platforms of centrist competence.

This is a great way to express it and I thought this was pretty clearly his view in the essay - not that politics had literally stopped existing (the way this thread went is probably my fault for choosing a provocative pull quote for people to engage with), but that it become subject to elite consensus - and that the reaction to this has taken an unusual form that may or may not prove effective.

My view is that if you're going to stop engaging in active politics, you should also stop obsessively reading and thinking about it since you're just going to drive yourself completely mad for no concrete material outcome.

This should probably appear on the loading screen whenever you open the Twitter app.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 6:14 AM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

The big dividing point on the "left" is whether leaderless movements like Occupy (or BLM) that don't develop traditional enduring party structures are the future of politics or whether the lack of structure means that they can never capture enough enduring power to change things in a meaningful way.

Also, one could argue that mass politics are absolutely flourishing on the right.

discussions like these always discount how organizing and revolutionary action happens which is that it always starts small before growing into something larger. I think you could probably make a good argument about how that process of mobilization has been weakened and scattered by how we culturally constitute political action - less 'come help us with organizing membership charts and setting up seating' and more 'make sure to reshare this post and donate $5 to Kickstarter', efforts that peter out given the quantum nature of its focus

but this doesn't mean that local organizing isn't happening. the Free Fridge here in ATL, the Housing Justice League, civic orgs like Advancing Justice, the ATL Free Press Collective, these are all groups that are actively doing things, that have ongoing campaigns, who are having tough conversations with elected officials, who are doing community outreach, and etc. whether or not their existence or the existence of the myriad other groups like theirs are acknowledged by the public, by historians and sociologists, or by the internet commentariat is a different thing entirely

y'all can cite 'BLM' like it's a thing, for ex, but the loosely organized chapters that existed in force in the public imaginary are still doing things, it's just that CNN/MSNBC doesn't care anymore and they just may not be calling themselves BLM-[regional] anymore. the ATL prison, for ex, was on its way to being shut down because of once-affiliated BLM folks who are now organizing under different names. the resistance to ATL PD building the largest police training facility in the nation (ie Cop City) was also opposed by many of the same, again under different names. but how many people know of this lineage? would acknowledge it? care enough to be keeping track of it?

there's an insipidly neoliberal focus on movements that only ever recognize ones that have some kind of brand power behind them, a focus that overlooks the historic, always-present work that smaller organizations are doing, the difficult, boring, and often failing drudgery that is the day-to-day grind that Ella Baker was best at, someone who is left generally (and unsurprisingly) unrecognized by all white liberals who claim they know the "true" Civil Rights Movement

it's so much more sensational and brings in so much more ad revenue to be penning inflammatory articles about the far right, those deep extremist discussion boards, than to write feel-good stories about how local anarchists have set-up a food/resource distribution network for the homeless (eg Love Not Bombs) or how the local socialist chapter has had a committed, years-long letter writing effort to the imprisoned

it's a self-fulfilling prophecy where internet leftists whinge on about how there's no true leftist movement while they don't take part in any of the actual leftist organizing happening in their own neighborhoods
posted by paimapi at 8:04 AM on February 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Decline of collective institutions like unions and political parties

I mean, with the decline of association s and institutions, politics declines and you are left with marketing.

In the US, this was especially apparent when Obama scuttled the OFA organization in 2008.
posted by eustatic at 8:44 AM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]