It’s easy (1) to fall in love with a new word/concept and over-use it, not see its gaps. That is the stage I will be in or the next however-long around “hyper-politics”
“the Tories embraced a phase of what the political theorist Anton Jäger terms ‘hyper-politics’, in which politics is ubiquitous and absurd, touching on everything but changing comparatively little. Those exhausting, comedic and warlike days, dominated by the persona of Boris Johnson, threw everything up into the air, yet when it all landed, political and economic reality seemed remarkably familiar, just slightly more hopeless.”
(source is William Davies, “Fever Dream”, London Review of Books.
See also
Jacobin interview with Jager
Jager A. 2022. How the World Went from Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics. Tribune.
“In many ways it seems that the lesson which has truly been learned from the ‘post-political’ era is that politics must be reintroduced into the public sphere. But without the re-emergence of mass organisation, this can only occur at a discursive level or within the prism of mediatic politics: every major event is scrutinised for its ideological character, this produces controversies which play out among increasingly clearly delineated camps on social media platforms, and are then rebounded through each side’s preferred media outlets. Through this process much is politicised, but little is achieved.”
Yet our new ‘hyper-politics’ is also distinct in its specific focus on interpersonal and personal mores, its incessant moralism and incapacity to think through collective dimensions to struggle. In this sense, ‘hyper-politics’ is what happens when ‘post-politics’ ends, but not on terms familiar to us from the twentieth century — the form political conflict takes in the absence of mass politics. 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.
Jager A. 2023. Everything is Hyperpolitical. The Point Magazine,
Jager, A 2024. Political Instincts. New Left Review.
As the decade of protests made clear, however, Bagehot’s formula no longer holds. Passive support for the ruling order cannot be assured; citizens are willing to revolt in significant numbers. Yet fledgling social movements remain crippled by the neoliberal offensive against civil society. How best to conceptualize this new conjuncture? Here the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’ – a form of politicization without clear political consequences – may be useful. Post-politics was finished off by the 2010s. The public sphere has been repoliticized and re-enchanted, but on terms which are more individualistic and short-termist, evoking the fluidity and ephemerality of the online world. This is an abidingly ‘low’ form of politics – low-cost, low-entry, low-duration, and all too often, low-value. It is distinct both from the post-politics of the 1990s, in which public and private were radically separated, and from the traditional mass politics of the twentieth century. What we are left with is a grin without a cat: a politics without policy influence or institutional ties.
Footnotes
(1) Well, for me at least.
marchudson.net 
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