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/235/ Political Ritalin ft. Anton Jäger (Patreon)

Published:
2022-01-11 07:01:01
Imported:
2026-06
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On our current attention-deficit and hyperpolitical disorder.

In our book, The End of the End of History, we discuss the move from post-politics to anti-politics; from consensus to rejection; from apathy to anger. In a new article, Anton Jäger argues we've now moved into a hyperpolitical age. Is everything being politicised...except the really important stuff?

We discuss some examples of hyperpolitics in Europe and North America and ask if what's going on is just culture war, or something bigger. And what are the risks of an actual civil war in France or the US?

Reading:

How the World Went from Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics, Anton Jäger, Tribune

Introduction from The End of the End of History, Bungacast, Merion West

Did the culture wars ever end?, Q&A with Andrew Hartman, Illinois State

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Comments

Gary

Americans talk about BLM as an institution but they actually think of it as merely a cause. Very frustrating.

Ran Heilbrunn

Excellent episode. The notion of a permanent Dreyfuss affair is fascinating. Arguably, however, what distinguishes the Dreyfuss affair from modern controversies, is precisely its permanence. While the affair divided French society for more than a decade, contemporary scandals are highly ephemeral. Perhaps there’s a reversal of the relationship between these legal-political conflicts and the broader social cleavages they correspond to: what made the Dreyfuss affair so enduring was its ability to create social divisions, whereas its contemporary counterparts – the Rittenhouse trial is a perfect example – function as momentary battle grounds for preexisting struggles. Famously, the officer that led to Dreyfuss’ acquittal was himself an Anti-Semite. The affair was so significant – so permanent – precisely because it forced people to reconsider their positions. Today, in contrast, one can hardly imagine a liberal defending someone like Rittenhouse in the name of due process. In that sense, hyper-politics seems to be characterized by a strange combination between rigid ideological entrenchment, on the one hand, and a complete lack of principled opinion-formation, on the other. This corresponds to something you mentioned in the discussion – namely that feeling that there is so much noise, but so little substance. I think that the impermanence of today’s politicized scandals actually supports Jäger's broader analysis, in the sense that this rapidity is a key dimension of the hyperness of hyper-politics. This is a consistent feature not only of personalistic Dreyfuss-like dramas (Rittenhouse, Epstein, Kavanaugh), but also of politically broader events like the BLM protest (which also had a personalistic element, embodied in the figure of George Floyd). This so-called social uprising – the largest in US history etc. – was, at the end of the day, pretty insignificant. It was energetic, sure, but incredibly brief, even in comparison to the Occupy movement a decade earlier. In previous times, this level of street mobilization would have been much more disruptive. But in the age of hyper-politics, events are always-already formulated as consumable media spectacles. The immediate absorption of political events into a never-ending news cycle neutralizes any transformative or disruptive potential they might have, leaving us with the sense that crazy things happen all the time, but nothing really leaves an impact.

Davka Smolah Collective

(Actually, let me leave a more helpful, thoughtful comment.) Would not the concept of hyperpolitics benefit from a comparison with certain phenomena we saw with left-populism? I'm thinking specifically of figures such as Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Jeremy Corbyn, who during the anti-political 2008-2016 period rallied massive numbers of people to enter into established political parties -- from which those left-populist movements and their leaders were then deliberately repulsed and ejected, from the top down! If we're still living in an age of disintermediation, might it not factor in that so many of the mediating institutions seem to have decided that they like being "heads without bodies", and don't want mass bodies back?

Kenneth Smith

I’ll be honest the way George manages to bring it back to the lockdown no matter what the conversation is about gets a bit annoying. Maybe it’s because I’m in Washington state where Covid response has been basically in line with the most liberal logic and even here a true lock down never happened. I went on a camping/road trip during the height of the uncertainty when we still thought it could be contracted through surfaces. The vape store I bought kratom from never even closed! It seems like the discourse about lockdowns is much more significant as hypothetical than lockdown really was to me idk

Ran Heilbrunn

Fascinating episode. The notion of a permanent Dreyfuss affair is really intriguing. In a sense, however, the Dreyfuss affair is the opposite of hyper-politics. First, what distinguishes the Dreyfuss affair from modern controversies is, precisely, its permanence. The affair divided French society for decades. Today’s publicized scandals, in contrast, are highly ephemeral, and barely last more than a few news cycles. And while the Dreyfuss affair generated social divisions that lingered on for years, its contemporary counterparts – the Rittenhouse case is a perfect example here – merely function as momentary battle grounds for preexisting identarian conflicts. Second, there is a strong substantive element to the Dreyfuss crisis. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the affair “could arouse such political passions and inspire such an endless succession of trials and retirals [because] the doctrine of equality before the law was still so firmly implanted in the conscience of the civilized world that a single miscarriage of justice could provoke public indignation from Moscow to New York.” This type of commitment to pre-political principles is completely absent from our hyper-political culture. Famously, the officer that exposed the conspiracy and that eventually led to Dreyfuss’ acquittal was himself an Anti-Semite. Today, in contrast, one can hardly imagine a liberal defending someone like Rittenhouse in the name of due process, for instance. So, to me at least, these two aspects of the Dreyfuss crisis – its durability and substantiality – make it the antithesis of hyper-politics rather than its model.

big microbe

I take back what I said about you guys and culture war topics, you really nailed it this time, with the "mutual incomprehension" observation

NM

anyone have a link to the article Anton spoke of picturing covid governance as the divorced father returning to the fold?

Paul Brewer

FYI, I know Kalamazoo a little bit, as my brother and mother lived there for about two decades. I visited a few times over the years. It's indeed a typical post-industrial rust-belt small town, a potentially Democratic island surrounded by a deeply Republican agricultural area, in part owing to it having two significant institutions of tertiary education -- the private Kalamazoo College, a liberal-arts leaning place, and the public Western Michigan University, which has more science/engineering research but also hosts a regular conference on Mediæval history. However, in bygone years the Democrats were more likely to be drawn from people who worked in paper mills and other industries associated with agriculture and natural resource processing, the manufacture of taxicabs and pharmaceuticals. It's exactly the sort of place the Democrats need to win strongly to carry Michigan, but has every reason to feel 'left behind' by changes that began under NAFTA.