It was the summer of 2024 in Carindale, Queensland. I had gone to a salon for lashes and somehow found myself inside a political monologue.

The gen Z eyelash artist was white, university educated, hit hard by COVID, barely getting by. She was also fiercely anti-vaccine – and devoted to Donald Trump with the confidence of someone who had found, at last, a story that made the chaos cohere.

I mostly listened. Her world had too many moving parts: lockdowns, debt, work that did not pay enough, institutions she didn’t trust, online spaces she did. Trump gave shape to it by supplying villains, certainty and, most importantly, structure. I lay there with my eyes taped up, which is perhaps the ideal posture for receiving a monologue about the end of liberal democracy.

A year and a half later, reading Belgian historian Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics, I kept thinking of her.

Review: Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger (Verso Books)

Hyperpolitics names a world in which everything is political, yet politics is rarely durable. Private life comes with public meanings attached: the cola you drink, the person you date, the family member you cut ties with, the school your child attends, the vaccine you take (or refuse).

Jäger names the atmosphere of our time with real force. What he does less well is explain who has been formed by this atmosphere.

The young eyelash artist in Carindale was not apolitical or disengaged. She had read enough, watched enough, absorbed enough, distrusted enough to assemble a complete worldview.

But she was also saturated with causes, enemies, instincts and explanations. What she lacked was any durable institution – the parties, unions, churches or civic associations past generations turned to – through which all that political energy could become power.

So, politics is everywhere. Power is nowhere in particular. That is the condition Hyperpolitics captures.

As a youth researcher, I see this world all the time. In many advanced democracies, the sexes are moving apart politically, with young women becoming increasingly progressive and young men increasingly right-wing, widening the modern gender gap.

Here in Australia, this is reflected in dating and intimate relationships, too. For example, in a Triple J Instagram poll in 2022, 57% of the respondents said differences in voting would be a deal breaker.

Some young people are finding sympathy in places once considered politically marginal, including Pauline Hanson’s anti-immigration messaging in Australia – though the Greens are the most popular party for young voters, who are also the least likely of any age group to support the major parties. And yesterday, high school students around Australia took time out of classes to protest Hanson.

While some young men are drawn towards online communities reviving ideals of traditional masculinity, young women are driving new forms of feminist, environmental and social justice activism. Notably, though, some young men are turning towards religion, searching for certainty, belonging and purpose.

Australian gen Z is the first generation in history where men are more religious than women. At face value, this trend seems opposite to Jäger’s point of declining religious institutions – but this drive back to religion is about affiliation or belonging; it doesn’t reflect attendance at religious institutions like churches, synagogues or mosques.

All in all, politics arrives through algorithms before it reaches institutions. It is no longer something young people do: it’s something they inhabit.

Mass politics belonged to the 20th century

Hyperpolitics is a short book, under 100 pages. At times, it feels more like an extended essay than a full historical account. It is also beautifully written; sometimes too beautifully: Jäger’s prose can be elusive, even serpentine, and he relies on a very educated reader to keep pace with the literary and philosophical references. That gives the book its charge. It also makes it less open than it could be.

Still, the concept is powerful.

Jäger’s key claim is we have moved through several political ages. Mass politics belonged to the 20th century, when parties, unions, churches and civic associations organised people into durable blocs. Postpolitics arrived after the Cold War, when citizens retreated into private life and technocrats handled the hard business of governance.

Antipolitics followed the 2008 financial crisis: mass protests – like Occupy Wall Street to protest economic grievances in the US, and the Indignados movement featuring anti-austerity protests in Spain – paved the way for populist anti-elite sentiments in most of the Western world.

Hyperpolitics then arrived around the Trump-Brexit moment, argues Jäger. Politics re-invaded everyday life, in a world of weaker social and political organisations.

Political parties have lost members, churches have emptied pews, unions have weakened, and various civic associations have dissolved, he writes. In their stead, online life offered a replacement, with almost no barriers to entry and almost no cost of exit. Join a Telegram channel. Follow a political influencer. Retweet a thread. Post moral outrage. Leave when bored.

One could argue that this is participation. But it’s rarely organisation.

I think Jäger’s periodisation is elegant. Too elegant. He knows this, admitting political periods are never clean. Yet, the book often treats hyperpolitics as if it appears “somewhere in the middle of the 2010s”, as he puts it, amid Trump and Brexit. That “somewhere” does a lot of work. Perhaps because it did not appear in the same year for all countries, and definitely not for the same reason.

To me, this question is glaring: what caused hyperpolitics to arrive in the mid-2010s? Was it the rise in populism? Was it digital media? Was it the immigration crisis in the West? The aftershock of austerity, the pandemic, war, inflation, climate........

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