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or approved by Novo Nordisk. Hello and welcome to Unherd. My name is Johnny Ball, contributing editor at Unherd, also sometimes known by the online moniker Daniel Despotic in Road There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. So said one Vladimir Lenin, speaking at a time not unlike our own. A tumultuous period of extremes, a highly politicized era when politics totally dominated people's lives. And there's a sense in the last 10 or 20 years that the news has been on fast forward. There's a politically charged and febrile atmosphere. We're polarized, panicked, and we engage frantically with the chaotic, diffuse and ultra fast paced media environment. Our Prime Minister Keir Starmer, promised a politics that treaded lighter on our lives. But Labour's 2024 victory shows no sign of restoring a sense of control, order or stability over what feels like a never ending storm of global and domestic crisis. So what's happening? Can we trace this frenzied political landscape to the dawn of social media smartphones, To Covid, Brexit or blm, where many people worked themselves into a tailspin and jumped one after another down online rabbit holes? Or is our chaotic epoch a symptom of broader social forces, our economic decline, and almost two decades of anaemic growth since the global financial crisis in 2008? Well, today we have the perfect guest to discuss all of this, Anton Yeager, a lecturer at Oxford University, a New York Times columnist, and the author of a new book, Hyper Politics, which looks into our restless and unsteady public sphere, but asks why this overflow of politics never seems to translate into durable political change? Anton, welcome to Unherd.
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B
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
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A
You've got this excellent book, Hyper Politics. Can you describe, first of all, what do you mean by hyper politics?
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B
Yes, so this is the most important question that the book tries to answer. Hyper Politics, in the most succinct definition would be a process of repoliticization without reinstitutionalization. What the book really tries to do is describe and analyze a change in political culture, particularly in the west in the last 10 to 15 years, so Europe and the US so after 2010, in which you clearly see an increase in political activity or political consciousness, whether it's on metrics such as election turnout, protest activity, but even political violence. There's been a marked uptick in all of that since, let's say, 2010, 2011, and it's really accelerated after 2020. That has invited a lot of comparisons with sort of previous periods of high polarization or high politicization, the interwar period in particular. The idea that we're returning to the 1920s and 1930s, fascism is on the march again. But what the book tries to show is that many of these analogies and comparisons are actually mistaken, because much of that new political activity doesn't take structural or institutional form. So if we look at the indicators for party membership, union membership, but also just civil society in general, the crisis that was first diagnosed there in the 1990s and the 2000s has only accelerated in the last 10 years. And that creates a very strange hybrid, namely a situation in which more and more people are politically active and politically engaged, but they're not doing so in institutional context, and they're not doing so with very clear organizational affiliation. And that is a new situation. It doesn't really have a precedent in the last 30 years of Western history. It doesn't really have precedence across the 20th century. And this is really what the concept tries to do, is describe the novelty of our current state through this concept of hyper politics.
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A
Let's drill down a little bit into what you mean by this sort of repoliticisation. Since 2010 is the. Is the year that you're given for when these sort of. These metrics of politicization start to increase in terms of protests, strikes, etc. What are we talking about here? What are these phenomenon?
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B
This is not a purely atmospheric or anecdotal argument. It's not just something about vibes, as they say nowadays. Insofar as anyone who is logged onto the Internet, or anyone who followed contemporary public debate does have a feeling that there's been an increase, at least in political polarization or political debate. The question is, can we quantify this or can we measure this more objectively? And when you actually look at the statistics of the data, they do bear this out quite spectacularly. Namely, there's been an increase in electoral turnout. So if you look, for example, at American elections in 2020 and 24, you had record numbers of turnout, only comparable to, let's say, the early 20th century. So there's really been a marked increase there. But one of the most striking indicators, particularly protest activity. So there are some political scientists that say actually Humanity has never protested as much as they have in the 2000 and tens.
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A
So what happened in 2010, sorry, Arab Spring, the London riots we had over here?
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B
Yes, those are some of the first examples, obviously also are the mass protests in Southern European countries, so in Spain and in Greece, in response to the first austerity packages that are implemented after the euro crisis. But we can also look at the early 2000s. So the black Lives Matter protests in the United States were measured to be the largest in American history. Some of the estimates with the participants at 25 million. I mean, that's close to almost one tenth of the adult population in the US and it's very obvious that it tracks the beginning of the great financial crash in 2008, 2009, which starts as an American phenomenon, but it quickly spirals out into Europe and then becomes a global phenomenon. And this is really the causal driver of all these protest activities.
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A
So that's what you think is the sort of seminal moment, is the collapse of Lehman Brothers. And everyone's repoliticized by this kind of this great financial crisis. And we all start looking at our phones and trying to find answers and different alternative ways of organizing our economy, et cetera. Is that your.
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B
Yes. So I'd say it is the first spark. It's not the only cause driving all of this political activity. So I wouldn't want to reduce all of the politics we've seen in the last 10 to 15 years through that big bang. But it is indeed the first causal detonator of all the phenomena we're talking about, because, as I said, it begins as an American crisis, but it quickly becomes a global and European crisis. There are even our arguments, for example, that the Arab Spring begins because there's a freeze in international capital markets that makes it very difficult for some of those dictatorships to lend money, which, let's say, keeps prices low and thereby food riots start. And that's not the price of bread exactly. It begins with disputes about the price of. And then it spirals out into a revolutionary situation in which the regime is actually unseated. So once again, 2008, 2009 is not a local, isolated event. It is something that becomes a global sort of world historical event quite quickly. The question whether everything that happens politically in the 2010s can be just seen as a response 2008, 2009 is, I think, more questionable because what's also very clear is that there are these new tools for mobilizing people politically. There are new modes of political expression which are Much more accessible and much cheaper than anything that was available before in the 20th century, which also facilitate politicization in new ways. And the very obvious thing here is the Internet. So people are rightly skeptical of the idea that the Arab Spring was a series of Facebook revolutions. But at the same time, you don't have to reduce everything to the digital to acknowledge that the Internet has clearly opened up certain channels for political expression. It's reduced the cost of political communication to such an extent that people find it very easy to express themselves politically. While before you needed to have access, say, to a newspaper editor, or you needed to write a letter to a newspaper, or you'd have to print a pamphlet, or you'd have to stand in the middle of a square and take a megaphone and thereby make your political opinions known, it is now possible for millions of people to go online and basically air their opinions or send them into the digital ether. And clearly that facilitates forms of political action that was. That were very difficult to imagine 40 to 50 years ago.
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A
We've got this hyper political era in which there's all of these kinds of protest movements you've mentioned, blm, Occupy, the sort of, the movements in Southern Europe, et cetera. In this country, 2016, we have Brexit, which was a huge moment in our politics.
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B
It was the largest vote in British history, if I'm not mistaken, purely in a quantitative sense.
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A
And would you draw the causal line between the global financial crisis and that sort of 52%, the biggest sort of mandate for anything in British. Sort of.
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B
So the causal line is not linear in any straight sense. But there obviously is a connection insofar as the Brexit vote is very difficult to understand without the extreme austerity packages that were implemented under the coalition governments in the early 2010s, which I think, if you make the comparison, were some of the most severe ones that were implemented across the Western world. And then if you look at the regional distribution of the Brexit vote, there are all kinds of different reasons why it looks like it does. But the idea that austerity did play a really important role in determining why some parts of the UK then went for Leave rather than remain, very obviously can be traced back to 2008, 2009. So, once again, 2008, 2009 is not the monocausal driver of all of this, but it obviously plays a role in each of the stories we see in the 2010s, including, of course, the other spectacular upset of 2016, which is the Trump vote. And you could even say that then in 2020. And even some of the recent mass protests you've seen on the right in the UK can still be seen as sort of late expressions of a crisis that was first unleashed in 2008, 2009,
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A
it was all about the Southport riots and sort of the flag flying.
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B
Yeah, The United Kingdom March took part, I think, last summer here, which in the end are still attempts to negotiate or process the kind of upheaval and the destabilization that the great financial crash unleashed across the Western world, and which upended, I'd say, almost a moral regime that was constructed in the 1990s and 2000 that then proves itself untenable after the crisis.
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A
So we've got this almost unprecedented or sort of a new form of politicization. You've mentioned the Unite the Right rally, the sort of flag protests, Southports, etc. But you've already sort of hinted that you don't see this as comparable to the 1930s. And you've mentioned this is because despite the fact that we have this repoliticization, we have a lack of institutional institution building and institutional networks to sort of buttress that politicization. Can you just explain that a little bit?
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B
Yes. So, as I said, there has been a tendency, particularly on journalists and commentators, but also just people who are engaged in politics more generally, to analogize a contemporary era to the interwar period. And I think that's a logical reflex insofar as a lot of the recent politicization we've seen has proven tendentially beneficial to the right or even the far right. And if you look at, let's say, the electoral map in Europe now, but you also look at the composition of governments, I think the far right is now in one third of European governments, or at least is lending its support to some of them. They're not just a force of opposition now, they're actually a candidate for ruling states. And that obviously naturally invites the idea that, yes, we are returning to the 1930s insofar as the far right is on the march again. And if you then see certain types of street violence, or the far right is organizing in organizations that engage in paramilitary activity, for example, it would be natural that people draw this comparison. At the same time, the real difficulty with establishing a perfect equivalence between the two periods is just that, as I said, there's another indicator in the 2010s that has continued to fall, and that is the indication of civic association or the strength of civil society, or the relative organizational density of contemporary societies. And there we see that party membership is still slumping, going towards record lows. Religious institutions are in a very deep crisis. Of course, on the left, there have been some upsurges of unionization or some moments of labor militancy, but they've been quite isolated and they haven't been quite general. And that really is a significant difference with the 20s and the 30s. Because even, let's say, far right political activity at the time was impossible to imagine outside of a certain institutional channel. So if you think, for example, the most dramatic example of far right militancy at the time, like the NSDAP or the Nazi movement, it was very much the case that being active on the far right at the time mean being a member of, let's say, the SR or the SS or any of these sort of parastate organizations.
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A
The Nazi paramilitary.
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B
Exactly, yeah. So you immediately ask yourself the question, if I want to be politically active on the far right, I'd have to do this in an organization. The example already of the Freikorps, which, for example, crushed the German Revolution in 1919, they were basically organizations that spawned by the army and that united veterans who then basically roamed around different German cities to restore order after the social upheaval at the end of the war. What we see today is that even if there are, let's say, these moments of political violence on the far right, particularly the English riots you talked about are an example of this, we can give other instances all across Europe, also in Germany, for example, what you see with all of those, no matter how, let's say, offensive or violent they can get, there is very little institutional structure to them. And I think the United Kingdom March is a really good illustration of what I'm talking about. So BNP marches are, let's say, a regular occurrence in British history since the 90s or even the 80s. I think they continue in 2000, and they usually are capped at, let's say, 10,000 attendants. So in the early 2000s, when the
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A
BNP markets, that would be a very good turnout for them.
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B
Yeah, that's a really great turnout. And if you look at the estimates for the march last summer, there's been a multiplication of the number of participants. I think the highest is 150,000 attendants. So clearly that is a really impressive turnout. The politicization we're talking about in terms of there's simply more protesters, but the crucial differences between the people who were there at the Bean pre marches before and the ones who were there at the right or the United Kingdom marches is that all of the people who were there last summer don't share an organizational prehistory in a specific institution. It's not as if they've met in the same pub, it's not as if they've gone to the same lectures. And after the march ends, it's not as if they're going to be acquiring membership cards of some kind of organization or whether they'll meet again, say in a different setting at a lecture hall, et cetera, et cetera. They might follow the same influencers, they might listen to the same podcast, they might be in the same telegram channels. That makes them easy to mobilize for that type of march. And that means they might join for one day, but as the march ends, they then disperse. And it's not very clear what kind of ties remain after that. And that, I think, is a crucial difference with the 20s and 30s. The organizational density of the right is simply not as strong and as robust as it is at, at the time. And there are now, for example, attempts on behalf of reform to found pubs or to build out some kind of right wing civil society. They're obviously looking for local councillors to run an election. So obviously they have to build out some kind of party infrastructure.
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A
Well, really, it's just Nigel on an iPhone. Well, there's no shadow cabinet now, but
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B
yeah, I mean, and because they have access to private funds and they can use that to do the kind of marketing or the social media outreach that will get them voters, maybe they don't need the party infrastructure. But there's a profound ambiguity there insofar as there isn't that rich civil society that once upon a time did exist on the right. And it's very, very telling that, for example, the one Reform pub that has been opened is set in a former Conservative club, so a former con club, which used to be, I mean, a real site of sociability for many people.
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A
A million members in the Conservative Party, I think there was at one stage,
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B
yeah, in the 50s and the 60s, the conservatives had more members than Labor. There's questions of how you quantify it, but clearly the Tory Party is the first mass party in Western history. So before the German SPD becomes a massive presence in Bismarck's Germany, the Tories are already busy building a mass organization and the Primrose League and all these kind of institutions, they're all disbanded in the 2000s. And it's not very clear that reform can sort of reclaim or relaunch that kind of right wing civil society. Maybe they'll try that's an open question, of course, but that, I think is the crucial difference with the past is that high politicization, even on the right, does not go hand in hand with reinstitutionalization.
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A
So we're all incredibly politicized, but we're all politicizing ourselves to an extent on our own, on our phones. Isolated, atomized individuals.
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B
Very individualized. Yes, yeah, yeah. And that doesn't mean there aren't attempts to institutionalize. So if you look at Corbyn's Labour Party, which for a short period was the largest party, I was going to
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A
ask where's the left in all this? Because we've only discussed the right. The right attempts to sort of utilize this moment of hyper politics. So what about the left? Is Corbynism an example of sort of left wing hyper politics or.
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B
Well, I think it's ambiguous insofar as there very clearly was an institutional horizon
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to Corbynism just in terms of Labour membership or.
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B
Yes, I mean, it was a movement that saw itself as taking over a party. And once you consciously orient yourself around the party, that puts you in a certain institutional horizon. That means you could not simply go for a horizontal protest movement that refuses representation or that refuses the idea that there should be some structures to how you organize. I think the ambiguity with Corbynism was that the members were drawn in in a way that Labour members in the 20th century were not, insofar as Miliband did literally reduce the costs of joining the party and thereby there was a massive entry of all these new members that didn't really have the same relationship with the party as before. And then there was the eternal question which I think also proved fatal for Corbynism, namely how you democratize or how do you make the party accountable to those members and to the new entrants, insofar as there clearly was an old Blairite guard that kept on waiting in the wings and was waiting for the occasion to basically launch a counter offensive. And once in 2019, Corbyn loses its election, then they basically take control of the party again. And the project of Starmer is basically to say we would like to rule without these members. We would consciously want to remain a party that doesn't have a mass membership because the demands both of the civil servants or people on the level of the state we have to cooperate with and our own party bureaucracy or our party elite actually prefer a party that isn't beholden to that mass constituency. And the fact that Corbyn.
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A
But many people left Voluntarily, you know, it was an exodus. Does that not say something about the sort of hyper political era? People are very kind of. People hold party membership very lightly.
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B
Yes.
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A
You know, it's kind of like it's kind of being part of a Facebook group, I think.
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B
I mean, there was a very clear sense on behalf of the Starmere that there wasn't going to be any way in which the preferences of the membership are now going to be represented on an elite level. But it is also true that it's undeniable that the type of party membership that became predominant in 2010s also in the left, was a very optional, let's say exitable or with low, cheap exit costs in a way that once you joined the party for a short period of time, there was no question that you'd remain a lifelong member. And your party membership was very much dependent on the leader of the party. So it's a very personalized form of leadership. While in the 20th century, and this is something you see with all kinds of parties of the left, your commitment was to the party as such, so you'd remain a lifelong member. I mean, there are many stories of people inheriting party cards from their parents, and the leader itself is there to represent the party. So the question is, we're looking for a leader that adequately captures what this party stands for. And no matter how the leader changes, our loyalty remains to the party. And I mean, the situation has been basically reversed both on the right and the left in 2010s, where you join a party because a certain leader leads that party, but it's not the case that you joined a party regardless of what leader they'd be. And once again, that ambiguity is not exclusive to the left. I think it also holds on the right insofar as. Can you imagine we've seen it in a reform now? Well, yeah, exactly. Can you imagine a Trumpism without Trump? Can we imagine a reform without Farage? I think it's a tricky question.
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A
So we've talked a lot about hyper politics and also touched on the sort of mass political era, the era of fascism, socialism, social democracy, those big 20th century ideologies where people were more likely to be in unions, political parties that were embedded into the sort of fabric of everyday life. If you like that sort of mass politics era in your book, you also go into another couple of areas which I want to touch on a little bit. There's an era of post politics which sort of neatly aligns with the era I was born into. So what's the post Political era. And how do we move from post politics to something you call anti politics?
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B
Yes, there is, as you say, a kind of schema we're looking at here, or there's a contrast between different political forms. So hyper politics is easiest to understand if you put it against some of these other political forms. We've already talked about the mass politics, and there's these two axes that I usually measure these political forms on. So what does politicization look at? How politically active or engaged are people? And then the other question is, how institutionalized is that political activity? And you can have either high politicization or high institutionalization or low politicization and low institutionalization. And it gives you all kinds of different combinations. So mass politics, as we've already intimated, is basically a form of politics in which political engagement can be quite high. Particularly, I'd say, in the interwar period, the 20s and 30s, when you have the wild era of mass politics in which you have street violence between the far left and in the far right that spills into particularly continental Europe. And there you see that both institutionalization and politicization are very high. The 50s and 60s, you could say that institutionalization still remains very high, but politicization begins to quieten down a bit. Even if you look at strike activity, that's not always the case. But then when you see in the 90s and 2000s, it begins in the 80s, but particularly in the 90s and the 2000s, that it really comes into its own. Both the political and the institutional axis begin to drop. So people hand in their membership cards, they leave unions, or they're pushed out in unions, they attend fewer meetings.
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A
Why?
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B
That's a good question. So just to say, and at the same time people tend to vote less, political scientists begin to worry about abstention at elections. Strike activity begins to slump.
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A
So we're moving from mass politics to post politics.
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B
Exactly. So post politics is a double minus insofar as both on the political and the institutional axis, there's the decline. So when we're looking at the institutional axis, why do people leave parties and why do they leave unions? I mean, some of it, particularly in Britain, just has to do with the destruction of some of these institutions. And so if the unions no longer exist, or if they basically fulfill a function that's no longer effective, it would be very logical that people just leave. Let's say, if the industries in which these unions are active are simply no longer present, then it would be logical that the institutionalization takes off.
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A
So again, it's an equal economic. It's a causal economic factor that leads to this sort of change in the political culture.
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B
Yes. So sometimes the causes are economic. There obviously also are all cultural causes, which I will not deny. I think a lot of people have put a lot of emphasis on these when the economic causes have become less prominent. But there is a generational change in which say certain people simply have a more optional or a more free standing relationship to these institutions so they find it easier to leave. And they say, have we culturally, we do not want to be in the kind of organizations that dictate our personal lifestyles insofar as being a member, sorry, of the French Communist party in the 60s and 70s did mean that you couldn't drive certain cars, you couldn't buy certain brands, they had certain opinions of what you'd do in the bedroom. And at one point there is a generation that says, well, I do not want a kind of institution dictating these
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A
personal trends and you have to be respectable. You couldn't be blind drunk in the middle of the night in public.
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B
I mean, but this is even, this is a French story. But even in Britain this was not unknown insofar as these institutions did make very, very strong demands on how people live their private lives. And I mean I come on my mother's side come from a family that was originally Catholic in Christian Democratic Party. And yes, the party had an opinion about what you did at home about many, many things. And the idea that you'd switch parties and let's say my grandfather would suddenly vote for the socialists. He would probably have to move out of the village where he lived because he would be subject to stigma. He would be subject to all kinds of condemnations which would make it very difficult for him to remain there.
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A
Still like that with the Conservative Party in Liverpool.
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B
Yes.
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A
Well, less so with reform though.
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B
Yeah, yeah, exactly so.
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A
But we're moving to. So we move from that era to a more individualistic, free flowing, fluid, identitarian era in the sort of 80s, he's
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B
saying sort of, I think the 90s.
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A
The end of history.
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B
Exactly the end of history. When these photograph girls are first published as well, which kind of indicate that there's now a generation that finds it easier to live their lives outside of these collective institutions that have a more optional individual relationship to how they interact with a society as a whole, where your relationship, society doesn't have to be mediated by that institution. At the same time, I also want to make very clear that one of the reasons why people leave parties is not just because they're cynical or because they're individualized, but also because these parties are increasingly unable to deliver on their electoral promises. It's particularly the case on the left. So in France, for example, you have a coalition between the communists and the socialists.
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A
Under Mitterrand.
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B
Under Mitterrand. And there are all kinds of ideas about how they're going to create socialism in one country. And throughout the 80s there's a steady reckoning with the fact that both internationally but also nationally, it's going to be impossible to implement that radical program.
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A
Well, there's a reckoning with the bond markets which we're potentially seeing in Britain and all over the world now. The guilt traders won't allow us to do socialism.
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B
Yes. So, I mean, there's all these attempts on behalf of left wing governments in the 70s and 80s to basically find a way out of the crisis. And in the end, most of them, or the vast majority of them give up on this attempt. But the reaction that many voters and many members have to this is quite logical. They say, well, we were offered a choice. So at the election they said we can either do this or we either can do that. And in the end, and it turns out we don't have a choice. In fact, decisions are made elsewhere. They're either outsourced, let's say, to international bodies or to financial institutions or to these new technocratic bodies called central banks, which in the 80s and 90s begin to play a far more prominent role. And then the logical conclusion they have is to say, why would I continue voting or why would I continue participating in these parties if they cannot execute the programs they're elected on? So the cynicism is just understandable.
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A
So we have a phenomenon of politicians almost giving away their powers. You know, they used to set the interest rates and they hand that over to independent central banks. In Britain we have the emergence of the Quango ocracy, you know, the emergence of institutions like the OBR and all kinds of Blairite civil service networks that basically take huge aspects of public policy that used to be decided democratically and say, no, we're going to entrust this to a board of technocrats or experts. And this is the key feature of post politics.
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B
Yes, I mean, so I think it's the story of post politics on the level of the state. So we've spoken a bit about the story of post politics on the level of society. What does the population itself do? How does it leave institutions or how does it, let's say, develop a different relationship to them.
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A
And I guess we have growth at this point, don't we? We have good 2 or 3% growth. So people are just kind of able to sort of relax into their careers and their family life and so they're not really bothered about.
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B
So we're already looking ahead here insofar as on the level of the state, there's a displacement of power, where power is increasingly out of the hands of elected politicians, or elected politicians operate within constraints that are so harsh that decision making simply doesn't happen there anymore. The famous phrase in the 80s and 90s, we're in office but we're not in power. Great illustration of, I think, the post political problem. And then on the level of society, people just retreat from the public sphere and from parties because they say, well, I don't have any choice because the decisions are made elsewhere. This works as long as you say you have growth because it has a pacifying effect. And you can buy off a population that doesn't have real control. And you can say, well, the things you used to do in the public realm can now be transferred to the private realm. And there are all kinds of options for private consumption and private pleasure and private control that you can offer, which are mainly furnished through private credit and particularly in Britain through the financialization of the economy. That is all well until 2008, 2009 I think blows out the foundations foundation.
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A
The whole Blairite sort of Thatcherite Blairite model is blown out of the water.
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B
Well, and then there is a conscious decision also to pursue really brutal austerity measures, which obviously means that all the social contract of the 90s and 2000, the social contract of post politics, is breached to such an extent that people react to it in a way that they now realize that they have to engage in some kind of collective action. Everything that was done privately has to now again be done publicly in 2010. But, and this is where we're moving into the anti political era, they quickly realized that the kinds of collective action that was still possible in the 20th century are much more difficult to pursue in the 21st century.
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A
The people who benefit from this sort of 21st century, post 2008 era are people who define themselves as sort of anti political politicians. I guess you would say Trump is an example, perhaps Corbyn, to an extent, he's always seen as an outsider.
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B
Many people describe all of the movements that arose after the 2008, 2009 crash, particularly in the Atlantic world, as so called populists. There's some reason to use that term insofar as there's a common rhetoric of the people or of popular sovereignty that unites all these actors. But at the same time, I'm very uneasy with the idea that you can put Corbyn, Bernie, Sanders and Trump and, and let's say Marine Le Pen in one and the same basket and pretend as if they belong to one in the same category. What is undeniable is that they're all movements that agitate against a certain political establishment they consider as responsible not just for post politics, but also for the really terrible Crisis management after 2009, 2010. This is the very superficial similarity they all have, namely it's critique of a post political class which they blame for not finding a proper political solution.
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A
The swamp the elites.
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B
Yes.
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A
Corbyn calls it the few, the many, not the few.
- [32:23]
B
Yes. So there is a type of anti elite politics that unites the right and the left. They do have very different answers to it. So I'd be careful to differentiate and distinguish there. But yes, they form part of one and the same moment. The difference with hyper politics, or why is anti politics different from hyper politics? Well, because as I said, there still is an institutional horizon to anti politics. Corbynism wants to capture a party, Bernie wants to run on a democratic platform. And you can very clearly see that distinction insofar as the first waves of protests in 2010 within the India, for example, in Spain, that ultimately turned into the party called Podemos.
- [33:00]
A
They say this is the anti austerity party in the early 2010s.
- [33:03]
B
Yeah, they say they do not represent us. We do not feel represented. If you make that claim, you say, here is a set of representatives that don't represent us. So we need to look for a different representative entity that can represent us. But the difference with hyper politics, I think later in the 2010s is that with the realization that it's much more difficult to institutionalize that political activity in the 21st century, you become or you get a different reflex, which is we're against representation altogether. So the difference, let's say, between the, say they don't represent us and therefore we have to look for different institutions to represent us is significantly different from, let's say, the yellow vests in the late 2010s who say we do not want to be represented. Anyone who claims a mandate or anyone who claims that they speak in our name is intrinsically suspicious. And that is, I think, a significant shift which distinguishes the anti politics with some kind of institutional horizon from the hyperpolitics that that completely abjures institutions as such.
- [34:04]
A
Obviously, I think it's fair to say you're a man of the left, but what's your opinion of the main sort of vehicles promising us deliverance from this sort of critical era? We're talking about the era of very low growth, incredibly unstable politics, a state unable to deliver really sort of ideological confusion amongst the population that's looking for answers in all sorts of. Of new and crazy places. The people who are promising us deliverance are the sort of vehicles like reform, the sort of Trumpian right, AfD in Germany, Bardella in France. Why is the right better at capitalizing on this than the left? Where has the left gone wrong?
- [34:49]
B
This is, I think, a key question, particularly if you want to compile a retrospective of the 2010s, namely, why is it that the right seems to have won the race for hyper politics or seems to have benefited more of the moment than the left? I think there's a first thing to be said that has very little to do with the 2000 and tens as such. Namely, the right just enjoys a structural advantage in every market society, insofar as Marx famously said, it's the party of order rather than the party of progress. What is the aim of the party of order? It's to stabilize or consolidate or pacify an existing order, to preserve a set of, for example, existing property relations. And thereby, would you say Trump was
- [35:29]
A
a party of order? There's not much order in Trump's White House.
- [35:32]
B
Yes, obviously there are certain revolutionary ambitions on the right.
- [35:37]
A
Liberal globalization with the tariffs and protectionism.
- [35:40]
B
So again, it's not as if there isn't such a thing as a revolutionary or let's say an offensive. Right. But in the beginning, the idea is we want to stabilize in existing order. This means the benchmark of success on the right is simply lower than on the left. And I'll give one example in Europe, namely the difference, let's say, between Salvini in Italy and Tsipras of Syriza in Greece. Tsipras gets elected on a platform to basically get rid of the European austerity regime and get Greece out of this depressionary spiral, they fail to deliver this,
- [36:11]
A
or at least this is in the mid 2010s, when.
- [36:14]
B
2006.
- [36:15]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [36:15]
B
So when Syriza gets elected in 2016, and then they engage on an offensive with the European authorities, they fail to actually carry it through and disregard the result of the referendum, and they're punished for this because they were elected on a promise to end austerity and they failed to do so. And then voters are disappointed. Salvini had all kinds of wild dreams about Italy exiting the euro, about doing a massive deportation campaign, about let's say, ending net migration to Italy. None of this came to pass. And he's quickly downsized some of these expectations. But they've not been punished by their electors in the same way because I don't think they have the same relationship to their base in such a way. The base doesn't expect the same of the right as it does from the left. There's a second point which I think is really important for understanding.
- [37:02]
A
Just come back to Italy. Where does Meloni fit into that? Because Salvini's a different figure on the Italian right. He's the la lega. And Meloni, who's the Prime Minister now, who's incredibly popular, yes, despite ruling as a sort of quite, quite orthodox center right conservative.
- [37:19]
B
I mean, she's from a party that has a very direct link to Mussolini's fascist outfits. So she has a very direct connection to 20th century fascism. But the way she's governed and the reasons for success are obviously very different from mid century fascism. Insofar as she's really ruled as a good student of the European Union and of the Atlanticist order, she's very quickly adjusted and shelved any of the anti systemic ambitions she's had before. And once again, once the right neglects or doesn't follow through with these premises, it's very clear that they're not punished for it in the same way because they didn't have the same ambitions in the first place. They're not as anti systemic as the left is. I'm not saying this in a moralistic sense, I'm simply saying there is a structural difference there. The second, and I think this is really crucial for understanding, for example, the difference between reform and Corbynism. So why has Farage weathered the storm of the 2010s and was able to be reborn again and then relaunch a new outfit? There is an access to private funds on the right which isn't as self evident on the left. And if you look at for example, the Unite the Right or the United Kingdom march last summer, the fact that Elon Musk, so the richest man on the planet, actually provided some financial firepower for this march shows that, yes, the right can then turn to certain kinds of private donors which allow it to mobilize and allow it to strengthen its electoral machine in such a way that the left finds more difficult.
- [38:46]
A
That's Always going to be handy. But devil's advocate, the left does have access. Corbyn's Labour Party had access to a huge amount of money from Unite the Union and Unison in general.
- [38:55]
B
Well, but I would not say that the, let's say, funds that Unite the Union has are comparable to what? Yes, that is not the same. I'm not saying there are no funds, it's just that it's less self evident or less immediate at the same time. And here I think we are arriving at a more contingent or less structural difference between the left and the right within contemporary societies. There has been more of a consciousness on the right that you need to maintain a united front and need to diminish certain sectarian differences if you want to win. You need to build up some kind of institutional structure if you want to be able to survive through all these electoral cycles. And that I think is less due to, let's say, the access to private funds or the fact that you're the party of order. That just promises stability rather than. But does have to do with the fact that the right has had a bit more intellectual and political discipline. I think that's clearly the case. And if you look, for example, at the National Rally in France versus Melanchon, clearly the National Rally is not a complete pseudo party. It's not just a digital outfit. They have an old cadre that they've Transported from the 80s and the 90s as they've broadened their base. And that clearly comes in very, very handy. What you see with Melanchon is that he's basically built something he calls a gas like party. So a party that's not legally even registered as a party, that doesn't have members, but only has followers, and that is a very volatile organism to, let's say, wage campaigns with.
- [40:29]
A
It's a personal vehicle. Yes, but he's done relatively well, you know, isn't that kind of living proof that you can go so far in politics without that kind of institutional structure? You know, Nigel Farage is another perfect example. He's led in the last 200 national polls just by sort of doing a very low tech sort of campaign without a sort of huge mass membership operating in every sort of town and village. It's just Nigel and an iPhone until he announces Shadow Cabinet this week.
- [40:57]
B
The question is, how long can you coast off?
- [41:01]
A
The point is, it's not durable, it's not sustainable.
- [41:03]
B
So this hobbyism, I think, only gets you so far. And then you need to draft all kinds of local councillors and then you don't have candidates. And then it turns out you've generated candidates with AI and you've sort of invented or you've made up certain fake names in order to be able to basically register your local reform counselor. And if he wants to turn the party into a real alternative to the Tories, or wants to displace the Tories as the party of the right, it's not something you can do in one media cycle or one electoral cycle. You have to think long term. And thinking long term means building institutions. And if you want to build institutions, you might want to think about members, you might want to think about what your donors are putting their money in, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, Farage has obviously nine lives as a political operator, but even he if he wants to see Reform UK turn into the new governing party of the right, the new de facto party on the right, I don't think it's possible without it becoming something like an official party.
- [42:07]
A
You can discover more of these kind of conversations with an Unherd digital subscription. You get 12 weeks of unlimited digital access to unmissable articles from all of our writers such as Kathleen Stark, Glenn Lowry, Wolfgang Munshal, Yanis Varoufakis, and many more for just £12. As a subscriber, you can also watch exclusive weekly events here at the Unherd Club and read more in depth subscriber only. Investigations and deep dives. Not only that, we'll send you a free limited edition JG Fox Illustrated mug which features a punk protesting against offensive speech, which I hope you notice is ironically capturing our mission here at Unherd, which is to serve as a home for those still willing to speak their minds. Go to unherd.com podcast to claim this offer now. But political dividends are really there for people who know how to exploit that sort of chaotic, schizophrenic media environment and really cut through the noise. You know the there's so many outlets, so much content we're bombarded on our smartphones, where it's not just the BBC flicking a switch and speaking to the whole nation anymore, or Roosevelt with his fireside chat. It's one to many communication has been replaced by many to many kind of diffused networks. The political victories are going to be won by people with big personalities who are brash, who really know how to stand out in that very kind of crowded field. And Farage is an example of that. Trump, but to an extent Mamdani as well. But your point is, the likes of Mandani, he's not going to last unless he can build through trade unions, through community groups, through voluntary networks.
- [43:45]
B
I mean, so social science predictions are always very tricky because we're dealing with a very soft data kind of reality. It's very obvious that you cannot clone a dinosaur nowadays. You cannot go back to the 20th century, look for the DNA of some of these fossils or these mass parties and say, okay, we'll take that genetic material and implement it in the contemporary setting, breed it in a lab and then launch it in a contemporary environment. The dinosaur will go extinct very, very quickly because we now live in a much more hostile, much more difficult ecosystem for these creatures to survive. At the same time, complete liquidity or a surrender to that new digital environment, A world in which more people listen to podcasts than watch television, for example. Yes, that gives you short term gains, but if you want to think about the long term durability of your project, that also is tricky. And if you think of something like the five star movement in Italy that completely embraced the new digital environment, that created a sort of pseudo digital party which you didn't really have members, but only people could click on the different options you'd have, they are now extinct as a political force. Their survival rate was very, very low. They had a lifespan that I think did surpass one decade. They were the biggest party in Italy at one point and now they're non existent. And the parties that have managed to consolidate their power in Italy are parties that clearly have combined both modes. They have the old style militant mass party at its core and at the same time they also have digital outreach. And I think that's also been the case.
- [45:21]
A
Give me an example of someone who's combined those two.
- [45:23]
B
I think Mamdani is actually not a bad example insofar as clearly there is a very savvy digital strategy. But at the same time there was a lot of door knocking and there
- [45:30]
A
was institution building, lots of volunteers.
- [45:32]
B
Yes. And there was, I think input from certain unions and certain civil society organizations that made it liquid and digital, but at the same time a bit more solid and recalcitrant or calcified in that way. And it's the people who go for the genetic hybrid that I think have the brightest future precisely because they can navigate or they can bet on both horses. They can say we need the digital outreach and digital strategy, but at the same time we need a more sturdy party infrastructure. Because if you go for complete liquidity, you'll be swept up in the next wave and then you'll be gone. And that's the story of the five star movement. If you go for, let's say the
- [46:12]
A
fossilized version, the nostalgic sort of.
- [46:16]
B
Exactly. Then it's as I said, the cloning of a dinosaur and, and the dinosaur is not going to last. Or you build a sort of fortress that insulates yourself from society, but that means you basically have no grip or you don't have any constituency you can appeal to. I mean, and there certainly are some communist parties for example in Greece or even in France that still see themselves as these fortresses of 20th century mass politics. But they look like antiquated sclerotic geriatric
- [46:45]
A
retirement clubs or political retirement clubs. Yeah.
- [46:48]
B
And I mean the Tories that still hope they can somehow take the energy from that 20th century right wing civil society and hope that they can remain a mass force with that. I think the median age of the Tory party is now still, what is it, 72. I mean different kinds of estimates. But it is like obviously not a very young party anymore. And reform has I think managed to draw in certain younger voters as well. The way that the Tories, I mean the Tories are an anti youth party also on the level of political economy, of course. And yes, that, that's obviously not going to work for them if they want to remain relevant as a political force.
- [47:29]
A
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- [48:59]
B
Yes, I think I'm an advocate of political patience, particularly on the left. I think we live in a culture that encourages an ideal of immediacy or an ideal of instant politics that I think is quite dangerous. And I think the argument for thinking long term of thinking about futures that are quite unrewarding and that might not instantly get you the kind of results you want is a mentality that is very important on the left because the hyper political impasse is precisely due to the fact that it seems very easy to mobilize and get loads of people together very quickly, but then keeping them together and so of durably moving with this group through time has become far more difficult. And in that sense I'm sympathetic to the idea that the slow politics which some people who are behind the your party politics are insisting on is something I'm sympathetic to. There is just this, I think, trade off between brand recognition nowadays in terms of politics, where you have to draw people into your organization with certain figures that, that they know because they will not have a very strong identification with a certain ideology. You live in an era in which ideologies are not the best mobilizational tools and therefore a certain figure will prove much more effective. But at the same time, by creating dependence on this figure, you're also reducing the, let's say, solidity of your organization. Because as we saw, once the figure then leaves or even dies at one point these people might all abandon the ship and then the organization basically becomes a hollow shell. And I think the real task is basically not to make a fetish out of total democracy and proceduralism and to say, well, you need to be able to have certain institutions that can respond to political events quickly and don't have to consult membership each and every time. There simply is a question of how you transfer a mandate from base to top, in that you're capable of responding to political reality while at the same time not creating, as with Melanchon and La Francais Hmis, for example, a very top, heavy, personalistic, leader dominated institution in which the members are not even members,
- [51:10]
A
almost a cult, almost cultish aspect that follows.
- [51:13]
B
I mean, it's a kind of loaded comparison. But La Francais Humise looks more like the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, which is run by Ger Wilders. That party has won the election.
- [51:22]
A
They recently won the election.
- [51:22]
B
They recently won the election.
- [51:23]
A
So you can do quite well with this.
- [51:25]
B
You can do quite well. But he has a personnel issue insofar as when he gets into government, there's
- [51:29]
A
no one to run a department or implement policy.
- [51:32]
B
There is no cadre. He has to hire technocrats to basically do the job for him. The technocrats don't identify with him. He just personally picks all the parliamentary appointees. His party has one member, which is Wilders. And you can't become a member of the party. You have to become a follower basically on X. And the question now is basically, well, that gets you a certain name recognition, but it doesn't allow you to govern while at the same time becoming a sclerotic sect that sort of obsesses over procedures and obsesses over institutional rules.
- [52:06]
A
Becomes kind of sectarian. Yeah, yeah.
- [52:09]
B
That means you shield yourself from society. And I think the real question with your party is how it finds a kind of midway option between institutional sclerosis and complete personal.
- [52:18]
A
And what's your view on the sort of new rights, sort of stealing some of the clothes of the old left, if you like. A lot of it's kind of aesthetic, you know, the Trumpian appeal to the United Auto Workers and sort of blue collar America and sort of Democratic voters in the Rust Belt. And similarly here you've got Nigel Farage doing the People's army, appealing to those kind of white working class red war voters, people who might have in the mass political era or being members of trade unions or voted for the Democrats or the Labour Party or even parties to the left of that in continental Europe particularly. And now they've shifted to the far right. So what's your take on the way that the right has kind of adjusted and now they're pursuing, they would call it sort of pro labor protectionist policies in a lot of cases. Or is it just kind of a ruse? Is it all a sort of aesthetic con?
- [53:09]
B
I mean you have to. Facts are a holy thing, as they say. So if you look at the statistics and it is very clear, and I think this is significant difference with 20th century fascism. It is very true that the contemporary far right has been able to draw in a degree of working class support or lower class support in a way that the 20th century far right was not able to. So mid century fascism or interwar fascism was very much a phenomenon of the middle class. It's not very clear that the outreach of the Italian fascist and Indian SDAP in Germany that they have very deep support within the working classes, particularly industrial working classes, it's very clear that in the last 30 years the far right has broadened its support among those layers. And denying this on the left, I think is a strategic mistake. At the same time, there are two questions. Namely, the first is how sturdy or sort of how strong a relationship. Is it just a flirt or is it actually a relationship? And there I think the picture is much more ambiguous insofar as because these working class voters vote for these parties does not mean they've necessarily become members. I mean, you cannot become a member of Geert Wilders Freedom Party. So that's one thing. So this does not mean they have the same mass political relationship with these parties as they did in the 20th century.
- [54:33]
A
Well, there is a kind of cultural disconnect, a cultural aversion. These kind of student types, these, these student leftists who don't understand the question of.
- [54:42]
B
Yeah, there is a kind of sociological alienation between the different bases of the contemporary left, because the contemporary left is
- [54:49]
A
basically graduates with no future.
- [54:51]
B
Well, I mean, it depends on what kind of party you're talking about. If you took, let's say, if talk about the Brazilian Workers Party, that's obviously not the case. They still have that kind of industrial base in Europe. It's very clear that many parts of the left are heavily metropolitan. Yeah, and heavily metropolitan. Yes.
- [55:06]
A
And have any man of pond does
- [55:07]
B
not imply middle class per se. It does not imply upper class. So for example, once again, Melanchon does very, very well in the cities. He does very well with working class
- [55:15]
A
voters in the cities and ethnic minority voters.
- [55:18]
B
Yes, but it's not as if the entire French working class is in the cities. In fact, there are many parts of that class that don't find themselves in metropolitan areas. And if you're unable to build any kind of base among those voters, you're not going to build a majoritarian block.
- [55:31]
A
You need some of the post industrial workers in the regions.
- [55:35]
B
Yeah. And I mean, there are all kinds of different complicated factors that come into play here. But to say that you can purely build a majoritarian left coalition on the basis of that metropolitan bloc is obviously not going to work. I think Corbynism and Menoncham both illustrate that it's simply too limited. You need to be able to reach out to the more peripheral, or let's say, the non metropolitan zones in order to win election. And it's very clear that even as the working class is now flirting or developing some kind of, how shall I
- [56:06]
A
say, a sort of an Antagonistic relationship with.
- [56:09]
B
Yeah, an antagonistic relationship to this metropolitan bloc and a optional or conditional relationship to the new far right. We shouldn't deny this. It's not clear to me that the far right has been able to build our mass working class politics, which it very much likes to assume it has. So when, let's say people in the Republican Party say we are now the multiracial working class coalition, it might be the case that there are certain parts of that class that are increasingly trying out or flirting with that party. That does mean they found a place in that party that is lifelong or that is not optional in some way. And then you look at the policy program these parties have and there I do not think it's in any way reasonable to say they have a very concrete workers program that Trump has delivered
- [57:06]
A
for the American working class or Farage would do the same.
- [57:09]
B
No. Whether it's tax hikes or whether it's on the question of how they want the treasury to take decisions or what they want the bank of England to do, or their ideas for re industrialization, for example, all of that is highly ambiguous, not to say non existent. And I think you have a kind of rhetorical workers politics without an actual workers program and a very, very small part of the electoral coalition that does look more proletarian than before. But to make these very confident claims that these parties are now new workers parties in every sense, I find completely unjustifiable. That to me is just a caricature, just marketing. It's marketing.
- [57:50]
A
Yeah, yeah. And nevertheless, the polling does show that these kind of C2D, if you like, non graduate manual workers are voting for these parties in droves. So I just want to finish with something. I'll give you the opportunity to finish from your perspective on a slightly more positive note. So what is the way out of this, of this impasse and reversing this trend from your perspective as someone on the left of politics? Do we all just go and join a union, join a political party, get involved?
- [58:18]
B
Well, I mean, this is not a pessimistic book. I do hope people don't read it as pessimistic. So as Lenin once said, there's no such thing as an impossible situation. So this was written very much with that adage in mind, insofar as it's meant to indicate that there are ways of moving beyond this hyper political impasse and to get back to the very succinct definition I offered at the beginning, namely, what is hyper politics? Repoliticization with re institutionalization I do not want this book to be read as nostalgic for post politics. I think it's.
- [58:48]
A
Or nostalgic for mass politics.
- [58:50]
B
More nostalgic for, well, you can't step in the same river twice and you cannot clone a dinosaur. So.
- [58:56]
A
Or you're not nostalgic for the end of history. Blair Wright, sort of technocratic model.
- [59:00]
B
I do not want to be nostalgic for the 90s and I do not want to be nostalgic for the 20th century because once again, the 20th century in its mass political phase could be. I mean, there is a mass politics on the right and it's nationalism and it had enormously murderous consequences. I don't think you can imagine the mass killing and the mass violence of the 20th century without the mass politics that existed on the right. I mean, so the sociologist Michael Mann wrote a book on democracy and genocide, I think, and he makes a very strong claim that democratization and mass violence have a very strong relationship. So the idea that you can just return to mass politics and everything will be cozy and comfortable is absolutely not the case. My claim is more that the repoliticization we're seeing is good. I think it's very good that people have an investment in politics now or that they feel that their libidical energy should no longer be invested or deposited in partying, but should now be invested in collecting consumerism or. Exactly that then is a good thing. The question is, how do you renounce institutionalized and accepting that people will not go to church as they did in the 20th century, both on the left and the right? Because I mean, the left in its mass political era also built churches in many ways. But at the same time the idea that you cannot ask people to go back to church on Sunday or join these mass institutions in a way that regulate their private lives in a very heavy handed way does not entail that you cannot think about what kinds of institutional options exist within the 21st century. Because if people have an appetite for radical politics both on the left and the right, there are ways. I think of thinking about these genetic hybrids I talked about, namely a mass politics for the 20th century that accepts the cultural change while not saying that thereby the only thing we have on offer is sort of short term indignation without any long term consequences.
- [60:50]
A
Mass Politics for the 21st century. Mass politics combines the best of both worlds.
- [60:55]
B
Exactly. And I think the only way to do this is to have parties that operate at different speeds, that have these concentric circles in which you have a set of members that Have a looser, more digital, let's say, more conditional relationship to the party. You can maybe mobilize them in election time, ask them to knock on doors, but then during the actual periods of government, they might not be in the party all the time. Then you have other members who I think are a bit closer to the center of the party that could be mobilized not just for election campaigns, but also for political campaigns that happen between votes, basically. And then you have a strong militant core that do, I think, spend their entire lives within the party, that also make certain financial contributions to the party that are quite long lasting and quite demanding. And they provide, I think, the core vessel that can basically maintain the durability and also the institutional personnel for a party that can also participate in power. And I think it's this organism that operates at different speeds, namely the looser and then the part time and then the full time members, that to me seems like a very promising way of reinventing mass politics for that new era. Because it accepts that there's been a change in political culture, but it doesn't surrender completely to the new political culture. And there are examples of this in Belgium, for example, with the Workers Party, which is one of the few left populist parties that actually has survived throughout the 2010s that's still growing member states.
- [62:23]
A
This party used to be a very orthodox, almost Marxist, Leninist Stalinist party.
- [62:28]
B
It was the classic example of a Maoist sect in the 70s. And they've engaged in a really interesting reinvention campaign throughout the 2000s and 2010s, insofar as they are a 20th century mass party, if you look at it from the inside. But they're also a record spender on social media. So they combine the new and the old.
- [62:44]
A
They got a good TikTok game.
- [62:45]
B
Oh, they're the leaders in terms of TikTok outreach in Belgian politics. I also want to say it's not as if there's no ambiguity to this. I mean, the party often gets into trouble because it's asked about its past and about some of the sectarian opinions it had in the 90s and 1980s. It hasn't been fully able to, let's say, get rid of this legacy. And the rhetoric or the way the party orient itself towards society is not, let's say, very doctrinaire Marxist. It's very much an anti le party that trades in what we call populist rhetoric. And I don't think it has a fully honest relationship to its base insofar as internally the old dogmas still apply. Externally, they talk a very different game.
- [63:29]
A
Quite a loose policy platform, anti establishments,
- [63:32]
B
anti establishment, very much against a certain political rather than an economic elite. So a lot about politician salaries and about the crossover between the public and the private. I mean, but that is not the same as a Marxist critique of capitalist society. I think that's something you can also find in certain parties of the right. So a lot of anti corruption politics as well. So there are trade offs, but in purely organizational terms, I think they've done quite impressively insofar as they have this concentric membership model in which not everyone moves or participates at the same pace.
- [64:03]
A
Anton, that's really interesting. We'll have to find out if anyone's
- [64:06]
B
listening to your strategic there's so much to talk about.
- [64:08]
A
Yeah, that's been really interesting though. Thanks a lot for talking.
- [64:11]
B
Thank you so much for your questions. Thank you.
- [64:12]
A
Thank you very much. Lifelock, how can I help?
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B
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't. One in four tax paying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud.
- [64:28]
A
What do I do?
- [64:29]
B
My refund though. I'm freaking out.
- [64:31]
A
Don't worry, I can fix this.
- [64:32]
B
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- [64:39]
A
No problem. I'll be with you every step of the way.
- [64:41]
B
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