Easy to Join, Easy to Leave

One​ morning in the summer of 2016, a few weeks into the disorientating aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, my wife and I sat in a community centre in Poplar, East London with our baby son. Our three-year-old daughter must have been at nursery. The occasion was a ‘consultation’ hosted by Tower Hamlets Council on the ‘future of Children’s Centres’ in the borough. Children’s Centres are a legacy of New Labour’s Sure Start scheme, which aimed to support the healthy development of pre-school children by providing local, freely available spaces for play, learning and socialising, as well as professional support and advice for their carers. The funding came from central government, but responsibility for the centres lay with local authorities. I have fond memories of the centres, which among other things were a welcome relief from the isolation you can feel when caring for small children at home. Parents would chat among themselves while the children got to charge around on tricycles and thrash musical instruments. The staff expertly disguised their expertise, gently offering suggestions to those parents who seemed a bit lost. There were plates of chopped fruit for the children before home time.

The austerity measures of the coalition government fell hardest on local government. In 2010, George Osborne announced that the grant to councils would fall by 27 per cent over the course of the Parliament. When the Tories won the 2015 general election outright, they leaned harder than ever into a neoliberal logic of private sector graft versus bloated public sector debt. Osborne announced even fiercer cuts to Treasury spending on local government, this time of 56 per cent. In the early days of the coalition, when ‘compassionate conservatism’ and the ‘Big Society’ were still part of the Tory lexicon, Osborne promised that Sure Start would be protected from the fiscal axe. But as demands on local government rose – councils are responsible for such areas of expenditure as adult social care, housing and children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) – his fine words were forgotten. By 2018, a thousand Children’s Centres, 30 per cent of the total, were thought to have closed.

As the consultation began, it soon became clear that whatever the ‘future of Children’s Centres’ in Tower Hamlets, the council had already made up its mind that there would be substantially fewer of them – nearly 50 per cent fewer. The aim of this pseudo-democratic exercise, beyond ticking a box to confirm that ‘users’ had been consulted, was at best to help determine which centres survived and which did not. I slunk into my chair with a feeling of futility, irritated we’d bothered to attend, though I tried to retain a modicum of sympathy for the local government officials caught between central government barbarism and ever escalating social need. Others in the room, perplexed at the idea that parents would consent to any of the centres being closed, asked what it would take to protect them. The officials could only reiterate that the council had decided to reduce spending on children’s services by £4.5 million, and the cuts had to be made somewhere.

The atmosphere in the meeting changed when a man sitting towards the back spoke up. He had a slight Australian accent. ‘This is all a scam,’ he protested. ‘We’ve been brought here simply to rubber-stamp something for the council, which it’s not in our interests to do. I don’t accept any of the options being offered. How about we use this meeting as the beginning of a campaign to save Tower Hamlets Children’s Centres from cuts?’ You could feel the mood in the room lift. As the meeting came to a close, he went around the room with pen and paper, collecting email addresses, promising to be in touch soon with news about the campaign.

That evening, it came to me: the man was Trenton Oldfield, who had made national headlines in 2012 when he swam out into the Thames to disrupt the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. Oldfield had justified his action as a political statement against austerity and inequality, arguing that the race was ‘a symbol of a lot of issues in Britain around class. Seventy per cent of the government pushing through very significant cuts are Oxford or Cambridge graduates.’ He was charged with causing a public nuisance and given a six-month prison sentence (he was released on a tag after two months in Wormwood Scrubs). The Home Office subsequently refused to extend his visa on the grounds that his residency in the UK was not ‘conducive to the public good’, but the decision was overturned on appeal, with Oldfield protesting that he and his British wife were expecting a baby.

Oldfield called his campaign Expand Not Extinguish. The emails began to flow, meetings were held, social and cultural capital was pooled. In the volatile political milieu of Tower Hamlets, it wasn’t difficult to track down councillors (some of them Labour councillors) who were unhappy with the decisions that had been made on the budget – the mayor, John Biggs, was seen by the left as a Blairite stooge. Sympathetic insiders passed on intel. People from the campaign turned up at Biggs’s weekly surgery, introducing Expand Not Extinguish and demanding that the council consult with them. Biggs agreed, on condition that any future meetings exclude the Australian man whose opening statement had been: ‘We are here to demand the resignation of John Biggs!’

The council eventually set a date for the campaign (minus Oldfield) to present its arguments formally, but the meeting was rescheduled, then rescheduled again, then apparently forgotten. The last message in my inbox from Expand Not Extinguish is dated 6 December 2016. A couple of years later, I passed what had been the Victoria Park One O’Clock Club, now with padlocked gates, moss engulfing a climbing frame and a few abandoned tricycles. I thought about George Osborne. Longitudinal evaluations of Sure Start published in the 2020s have been unequivocal: children who had access to the centres went on to do better at school, were less likely to be hospitalised, and less likely to be classified with special educational needs or disabilities. This last finding is bitterly ironic, given that the costs of escalating SEND obligations are now threatening to tip the majority of British local authorities into insolvency.

Oldfield’s collision with the immovable object that is a local government budget in an age of cuts, sluggish economic growth and social decay was a community-level manifestation of what Anton Jäger in his new book calls ‘hyperpolitics’: emotive, spectacular, brief and ineffective. A macroeconomic analogue would be the short political career of Yanis Varoufakis, whose style, energy and intellectual erudition made him an icon to anti-austerity activists after he was elevated to power by Greece’s left-populist Syriza government in 2015. Within six months, Eurozone finance ministers had agreed to carry on renegotiating Greece’s debt repayment schedule on the condition that Varoufakis (whom they considered untrustworthy and self-interested) wasn’t in the room. He resigned, and Syriza and its leader, Alexis Tsipras, clung on to power by cleaving ever more closely to macroeconomic orthodoxy, expunging any element of populism along the way.

Politics in the late 2010s was fertile ground for heretics, political entrepreneurs and narcissists, but these characters lacked the aptitude, the patience and ultimately the power to get involved in the long, tedious work of policy innovation. Hyperpolitics, as Jäger writes, is ‘the product of a hard but hollow environment, an attempt to break the iron grip of neoliberalism without the requisite tools to do so’. His book concludes with the words of the Belgian photographer Tom Peeters, articulating what Jäger sees as the manic-depressive condition of politics today: ‘My generation constantly oscillates between the realisation that we need to get moving, preferably very quickly, and the feeling that all is in vain. The true challenge – to change things – appears nigh impossible.’ For Jäger, and for many who are involved in left-wing politics and activism, this sense that anything can be politicised, yet nothing can be changed, is a matter of deep disappointment and bewilderment.

The hyperpolitical condition is often explained as an effect of social media. Historically it does coincide with the rise of the giant social platforms over the past twenty years. The speed with which issues, demands and slogans can gain mass circulation, then just as quickly die away, wasn’t imaginable before the inception of platform capitalism in the early 2000s. But it took until the mid-2010s for the political impact of social media to become clear. In the few days after Varoufakis resigned, #thisisacoup was trending on Twitter – an expression of global outrage at the terms being imposed on Greece by German financiers. Later that summer, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party following a viral initiative to take advantage of new leadership election rules, which gave non-members the right to vote as ‘supporters’ for a £3 fee. Facebook is understood to have had a significant influence on the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump the following year.

TikTok and other platforms were instrumental both in spreading outrage at the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and in mobilising the vast Black Lives Matter protests that assembled in response that summer. But as Paul Gilroy observed a few months later, ‘I don’t know if the technologies that get people in the streets are so good at keeping them there.’ The recognition that the viral surges of anger and hope between 2015 and 2020 have left little in the way of a political legacy has already given rise to some thoughtful historical and theoretical accounts, including Vincent Bevins’s If We Burn, Hannah Proctor’s Burnout and Jäger and Arthur Borriello’s The Populist Moment. The movements and ideologies that seem to prosper under these conditions are fluid, ambiguous and fleeting by design. The political and media theorist Paolo Gerbaudo has pointed to the rise of ‘digital parties’ led by ‘hyper-leaders’, which gain popularity by surfing waves of mass alienation. Nigel Farage’s succession of political pop-ups and rebrands – Ukip, Leave.EU, the Brexit Party, Reform – is a signal example.

What Jäger seeks to understand in Hyperpolitics is the way politics appears to have returned with a vengeance, yet at the same time turned on itself as a form of anti-political rage and hopelessness. He explains this in terms of two key dimensions of democratic health and power: ‘politicisation’ and ‘institutionalisation’. Politicisation is difficult to track empirically, but Jäger gives a broadly convincing history of a downward trend in the West from the First World War through to the 1990s, with countervailing spikes of political energy and mobilisation around 1929 and 1968. In moments like those, politics leaves nothing and nobody alone, neutrality isn’t an option, and the street becomes the primary theatre of democracy.

Institutionalisation is easier to track, and here Jäger draws on the work of the political scientists Peter Mair and Robert Putnam on civic participation, party membership and formal organising (as in trade unions). Institutionalisation rose steadily over the first half of the 20th century, peaking in the immediate postwar years before a gradual and then more rapid decline, prompting both Mair and Putnam to take the view that by the 1990s democracy had become a lonely, transactional affair, conducted from a distance (especially via television) and without mutual commitments that reached beyond the private sphere.

Institutionalisation gives form to politics, while politicisation provides the content. Institutionalisation is a matter of the way we pursue shared interests: voting, attending meetings, paying subs, delivering leaflets. Politicisation is what leads us to care about shared issues in the first place: feelings of camaraderie and loyalty, identification with a cause, a sense that the status quo is unjust, a fear of unrest or a desire for more of it. The politics of ‘mass society’ that emerged after the First World War was built on high (and rising) levels of institutionalisation and high levels of politicisation. In the 1920s and 1930s, people not only joined political parties in large numbers but were sometimes ready to fight and die for them. By the 1950s, politicisation was waning, but membership of clubs, churches, political parties, unions and civic associations remained a crucial source of identity, a way of interpreting the world held in common with others, not to mention a means of sharing useful information or meeting a potential spouse.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of globalisation ushered in a ‘post-political’ era of low politicisation and low institutionalisation. Political parties became more like businesses, expertly targeting their ‘offer’ to a customer base of potential voters, whose loyalty was fleeting. Politics became a niche interest rather than something that shaped identities and everyday activity. Consultants were hired to hone messaging to a public which, it was assumed, judged governments not for their ideological credentials but their capacity to deliver services. Civil society became dominated by large, professionally run NGOs, while volunteering and the membership of campaigns continued to decline. ‘A chasm opened between two dimensions of the political: politics and policy,’ Jäger writes. ‘Policy became the purview of unelected actors – central banks and bodies such as the European Commission – morphing into what would soon be termed technocracy. Politics was relegated to a media sphere addicted to novelty.’ Those who defend this era believe that it finally delivered on the promise of liberalism, allowing individuals to pursue their own preferences and values, unencumbered by the burden of collective decision-making and unthreatened by the potentially murderous ideological conflicts of the past.

The financial crisis of 2008 shattered this complacency, giving rise to a new strain of ‘antipolitics’ in the form of populist and start-up parties. These enjoyed some immediate success on the right: in the UK with Nigel Farage’s Ukip, in the US with the Tea Party movement, which mobilised during Barack Obama’s first term as president, and in Italy with the politically ambiguous Five Star Movement. Political authority could now be acquired by those with a public status outside mainstream politics, as Hillary Clinton was shocked to discover in 2016. In the 2010s career politicians lost out to a series of entrepreneurs, comedians, TV stars and previously peripheral political figures such as Corbyn. In the background, Jäger argues, was an increasing politicisation, and it has continued to increase ever since, with the anger of antipolitics eventually tipping over into the mania of hyperpolitics. Since 2016, politics has broken free of specific issues, leaders and demands, and now flows back and forth between public and private realms in a way that was unimaginable in the ‘postpolitical’ era of the 1990s. Hyperpolitics, Jäger writes, ‘represents a redoubling of antipolitics, a mode of viral panic typical of the internet age with its short cycles of hype and outrage’.

Crucially, however, while politicisation has continued to escalate, institutionalisation is at a low ebb. This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave. The chasm between politics and policy widens, as the former becomes a fruitless stream of outrage with little or no practical consequence. Jäger is almost wistful for the antipolitics of the early 2010s, which at least had specific demands, targeted particular elites and ‘made the first steps towards reinstitutionalisation’ via new political parties with concrete policy demands, such as Podemos, founded in 2014. He is suspicious of nostalgia for mid-20th-century social democracy, recognising that decades of deinstitutionalisation can’t simply be reversed, and that the sociological conditions for mass participation and mass membership simply don’t exist in the way they once did. The left, which once drew so much of its sustenance from organised labour, suffers more from the fragmentation of civil society than the right, which Jäger believes has done a better job of clinging on to its organising capacity.

Jäger has little to say about the most significant international left-wing mobilisation of the 2020s, the Gaza solidarity movement. Its long-term legacy is yet to be determined, but it has already resulted in a fresh wave of antipolitics on the left, the further delegitimisation of mainstream parties, and a scepticism towards domestic and international laws, especially in the eyes of the young. He also fails to consider the ways in which the second Trump term has broken with the chaotic pattern of the first, showing far greater policy ambition and impact. If we were to assess that the Trump administration belongs to the far right, not to the radical right of the Tea Party moment, that would cast Jäger’s thesis in a quite different light, making it clear that politics and policy can be brought back together, just not in a manner befitting a democracy. That is after all what the reactionary oligarchs of Silicon Valley, with Peter Thiel in the vanguard, have been demanding for some years: not technocracy in the sense of depoliticisation, but de-democratisation. The way these dynamics play out in the US and in Europe will determine how the era of antipolitics and hyperpolitics is viewed historically: either as a ‘new normal’ that we will have to learn to muddle through, or as a transition to something darker.

Afew weeks​ before Hyperpolitics was published, a not dissimilar thesis appeared in the pages of the Financial Times, but delivered in a jauntier tone. The columnist and liberal provocateur Janan Ganesh reflected on the fact that ‘a decade of political upheaval, almost none of which has been to my taste, has had essentially zero practical effect on my life.’ Nationalism, ‘deglobalisation’ and a more vocal racism seemed to have made very little difference: ‘If not a practical change, a cultural or atmospheric one then? A new unpleasantness in the air? Offline at least, no. The persistence of interpersonal civility out there is eerie.’ Ganesh’s happy conclusion is that ‘we just overrate the importance of politics … the central lesson of all the chaos since 2016 is society’s resilience.’

One obvious retort to this is ‘Check your privilege.’ Ganesh’s argument is unapologetically self-serving: so long as London’s transport infrastructure keeps improving, new restaurants keep opening and Brexiters stay in the provinces, the liberal elite can continue to reap the benefits of the socioeconomic arrangements that were established in the heyday of postpolitics. As politics becomes an increasingly online phenomenon, subject to the same bubbles, crashes and manias that used to be the preserve of financial markets, Ganesh reminds us that we retain the postpolitical freedom simply to log off and opt out. But how much longer will the insulation of politics from what Ganesh calls ‘society’ last? He wouldn’t have to travel very far from his comfort zone to discover a ‘new unpleasantness in the air’. Take a ten-minute drive along any of the main roads out of London and you will see the Union Jacks and St George’s crosses of the ‘Raise the Colours’ campaign hanging from any number of lampposts. Last summer’s protests against the housing of asylum seekers in hotels, followed by the Unite the Kingdom march through the centre of London in September, demonstrated a new refusal of the far right to remain corralled online. Britain can expect further surges in such activity in the years ahead, not least as a result of funding from sources in the US as well as Russia – the US State Department has pledged to support MAGA-adjacent movements across Europe.

There is another way in which Britain has changed since 2016, which has nothing directly to do with illiberal politics or the government chaos of the last ten years. By various measures, the UK’s social problems, and its capacity to address them, have continued to worsen. In the 2020s, which began with global lockdowns and some harsh lessons on the social determinants of health outcomes, there has been a growing pessimism about youth mental health, the future of social care, SEND provision, the problem of loneliness and the state of the local public realm. National and online politics is characterised by panics and manias, but it is the slow deterioration of local economies – including the continuing fiscal squeeze on councils – that accounts for more of the country’s depression than anything else. What Ganesh refers to as ‘society’s resilience’ may not be as near to imploding as right-wing fearmongers on X would have us believe, with their fantasies of a London besieged by knife-wielding asylum seekers, but it isn’t impervious to the effects of year after year of economic stagnation, budget cuts and rises in the cost of living. Jäger’s insistence that the left should learn from Robert Putnam (often viewed as a post-ideological communitarian) is a useful reminder that nothing good can happen democratically if people have nothing to leave their homes for, and no places to meet when they do. Covid and its aftermath have dramatically worsened this problem.

It is widely understood that Reform is benefiting electorally from a mood of socioeconomic hopelessness (which is not to say that it only courts the votes of the socioeconomically disadvantaged, still less that it has realistic plans to help them). Numerous international studies have shown a correlation between local austerity measures – which result in the closure of public spaces, the loss of jobs and the shuttering of high streets – and increased support for radical and far-right parties. That Tower Hamlets ‘consultation’ on children’s centres gives a hint as to the reason: by being invited to debate which centres deserved to survive, and which to be closed, the council was effectively prompting users to decide whose needs came first, and who could be thrown under the bus. As recent research on ‘zero-sum thinking’ attests, an absence of economic growth produces a sense that for one party to win, another must lose, exacerbating grievances that nationalists are adept at exploiting. One intriguing feature of contemporary British hyperpolitics is that Reform has ended up on both sides of the chasm between politics and policy, thanks to its success in taking over several local authorities and the likelihood it will take over significantly more after the May elections. Its self-styled political insurgents tend to arrive promising to restore local pride, put more money into local services such as libraries and cut taxes – all of this by eliminating ‘waste’ and cutting spending on equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives. This always proves impossible, though the resulting reality check may do little to change the fantastical alternative ‘reality’ retailed by the ideological entrepreneurs of YouTube and TikTok.

The politics that is currently encouraged and exploited by the contemporary radical and far right is born of the confluence of an imagined community (both good and bad), represented and disseminated on video-sharing platforms, and the reality of a depleted community that is visible to many people in their day-to-day lives. It isn’t just the separation between politics and policy that matters here, but the gulf between, on the one hand, fascistic images of past and future, and on the other, the disappointment of actually existing socioeconomic relations. There has been much debate in recent months about the political threat of such platforms as X, which under the mantle of ‘free speech’ have helped to unleash far-right voices and imagery around the world. But what of the politics of the local and the everyday? Jäger cites evidence suggesting that MAGA has benefited from a degree of local institutionalisation not matched on the left, which becomes potent when it coincides with economic decline. When people become sufficiently angry that they feel the need to make something happen, and are not yet so isolated and hopeless that they lack the resources to act, they are at the start of a road that can end in a 6 January. How and when Britain breaks out of its own hyperpolitical loop may depend on whether institutional resources can be rebuilt at a local level – and, no less important, by whom.