Would you agree that there is something like an ideal from which we gauge the deficiency of the age of hyperpolitics?

Well, I mean, it's a descriptive contrast, but it obviously has some normative valence.

So people have rightly noted that the chronology does charge mass politics with more potency or more potential than its successors.

And I think I'll put my cards on the table that, yes, I'm partial to certain mass political principles insofar as I think social change was easier to achieve and even instantiating ruptures with contemporary society was something that was easy to pursue also under mass political conditions.

So I'll say a couple of things also relating to the valorization or at least The profound ambivalence, I think, the end notes line has about hyperpolitics as something that is both a symptom that is inevitable, that cannot be contested, that just has to be mediated or reflected on, but also something that, as you say, is also valorized, that they sometimes don't seem to approve of, and which they, I think, gentrify as a political form today.

So I also want to clarify that mass politics in the book, and certainly to my mind, has no intrinsically revolutionary meaning.

inflection or significance.

Um, Could you speak to this question? I know this is not exactly covered in hyperpolitics, but perhaps you might offer some of your speculations.

So from your perspective, is MAGA hyper politics? Is it the coming of something new? How do you see what is happening there on the American right?

I think it's an interesting and complicated question because the first Trump term and the second term, term are q- Obviously very different.

And I do think the second Trump term is much more institutionalized.

I mean, for the first election victory, he himself and his entourage were surprised that he even won.

That wasn't the case second time around.

The Heritage Foundation Project twenty five, that indicates that they were better prepared and that there was a project of institutionalization which they consciously pursued.

The question whether MAGA is a mass movement and whether they've managed to reinvent, I'd say even certain forms of twentieth century far right mass politics, which I think is also related to the so called F question debate, whether Trump is a fascist or not.

Uh, money can talk very loudly, but I actually always think it doesn't talk as loudly as people think it does, 'cause I've watched a lot of money fail to get its way in American politics and elsewhere, that it's just so much easier to block anything than to achieve anything, that almost people don't believe in achievements.

But again, it's this kind of like they want to like Pinocchio it or Trojan horse a kind of like to get these achievements out of a state that cannot produce it because of the structure of the American state and also their position within it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I think there's an attempt to speed run, but also just to, to cheat yourself into collective agency and capacity, which I think is like a very tempting element also in contemporary political culture, precisely because the internet and, or the new public sphere incentivizes this quick fix shortcut mentality, which I think has also been stimulated by the rise of finance, which is not the most patient form of economic activity in many ways.

And as you said, there is a big difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2.

I mean, there was no Heritage Foundation, no Project 2025.

There wasn't a blueprint for what a deconstruction of the administrative state and this profound reordering of American foreign policy looked like.

is

Um, do you have a sense of what the solution might be for the left, at least?

I think that is not a very easy answer, um, to give.

Um, the book really tries to articulate a problem.

It tries to, uh, paint a sketch of where we are and what the limits and obstacles are.

It doesn't trade in prescriptions very comfortably, and I would certainly not position myself as a guru that can somehow give people recipes to magically solve all their problems.

I think the real question the book asks itself, what would it take to reinstitutionalize the new political engagement activity we're seeing in the last decade and a half? What would it mean to institutionally stabilize it, to give it longevity, and to make politics more institutionally articulate? And there it-- you cannot hope for the cloning of a dinosaur, to use- Uh, a rather complicated metaphor.

What do I mean by cloning a dinosaur? It doesn't really make any sense to look for these 20th century institutional models, the kind of mass parties that bound voters and members to them for a very, very long time, sometimes for the entire lifespan of some of these members, and simply think one can transplant this model into the 21st century, and that people are willing to spend their entire lives inside these parties.

I wish more, uh, thinkers were, were that way.

We've seen, uh, certainly in the short term, a change of leader can make a difference to the Labor Party in the UK.

I think leaders in an age of sort of increasing fluidity and volatility offer at least a sense of stability when everything has become highly insecure and, and precarious.

So there's a very clear sense that institutions themselves are not enough.

They cannot attract, uh, voters and members in any secure way.

You have to have a recognizable personality.

It used to be the case that people joined certain parties because they agreed with the ideology or the party program of those parties, and now it's actually the other way around.

It's the leader that determines the party program, and once the leader leaves, there's no actual independent ideology or program through which people might be attached to a certain organization.

How can political parties, political leaders then tap into this politicization with weak institutions? I- is there something that they can do? Do they just need to strengthen institutions, or is there something else that they should be looking at in terms of how they can make use of this desire that's out there for political activity?

So why don't you g- give us a short, uh, definition of what is hyperpolitics, and then, uh, we can go into, into the kind of meat of it.

Yes.

The very short bite-sized definition is hyperpolitics is repoliticization wi- without reinstitutionalization.

So those are the three words that capture the entire thesis of the book.

To put it more concretely, what it really describes is a change in political culture, particularly in the West in the last 10 to 15 years.

Now, the reason I focus on the West is not because of any sort of servanist or parochial prejudice, but more because I simply don't have the linguistic and cultural capacity to talk about, uh, most of those non-Western settings with any confidence.

Um, and what it's really trying to look at, as I said, is a change in political culture in which there has been a marked increase in political activity on a number of metrics, so whether it's voter turnout, whether it's protest activity, spec- particularly spectacular one, but also, let's say, political communication also as facilitated by the newly social internet.

It does feel more like a revolutionary movement than one which is about trying to uphold the status quo.

Where, where did that concern come from?

I mean, it, it's partly an outgrowth of a previous academic trajectory, I almost have to say.

That I wrote a PhD about populism, particularly the history of American populism in the late nineteenth century.

Uh, that was a historical PhD, so a PhD written by a historian for historians.

But I very quickly realized that writing a history about the late nineteenth century U.S., in which the word populism is introduced or used for the first time, obviously obliges you to also take part in some of contemporary conversations about what populism is.

Sometimes at some remove from that original American debate.

And, I mean, I even wrote a book about contemporary populism as well, which came out with Verso, I don't know, th-three or four years ago.

Instead of going over centuries, it's sort of decades.

Um, [lips smack] and so I just wanna, I just wanna understand, especially since, you know, later on you kind of acknowledge that the anti-political phase is, is, is very deeply similar to the hyperpolitical phase, just why we shouldn't start by kind of questioning whether there has been much repoliticization yet.

Yes, I think this is a very legitimate question because there's a tendency also to describe what I call high politics as a form of pseudo-politics.

So it looks as a form of repoliticization on the surface, but since there's so little durability, longevity, and also substance to it, there's a question whether we should even talk about repoliticization in any concrete, meaningful sense.

Um, and I also just want to make clear that some of these quantitative data are also indications.

There's obviously a more atmospheric argument you can make about how politics has now intruded into the private sphere in a way that it didn't in the '90s and 2000s.

I think there's lots of anecdotal evidence you can gather for it.

Um, and that there's a continuity which shouldn't be denied.

So comment.