Transcript
Speaker: I'm gonna go on this bro piece, I think.
Speaker: Welcome back to A Deaf is a Photograph, Culture at the End of History. Today I'm joined by Anton Yeager, who's a lecturer in politics at Oxford University and an opinion writer for the New York Times.
Speaker: We're here to discuss his latest book with Verso, Hyperpolitics, which I think, if I'm correct, grew out of a series of essays, one for Jacobin on Robert Putnam and ah one called Everything is Hyperpolitical for the Point.
Speaker: He's also the author of The Populist Moment, also with Verso, and Welfare for Markets. We asked Anton on because hypervoltaics, at least in my mind, intersects quite nicely with the ah themes we've been discussing on a kind of meta level in the podcast, namely kind of films at the end of history. but Obviously, the podcast has a much broader aperture than that around culture as an entirety at the end of history.
Speaker: And ah Anton's book sort of foregrounds that era from the 80s to 2008, arguably, and the era's sort of adjacent to it, bookending it in either way.
Speaker: Anyway, Antoine, thanks for coming on. My first kind of question is, this is a book that is like deeply concerned with what you might call the sociology of association. It's a book that really thinks about, in a way that I think most politics books don't think about association, which is something that's sort of minimized. um But this is a book that's deeply concerned with association.
Speaker: I'm just wondering where the starting point for you was in terms of your interest in association, right? Like on a very basic level, it's something we maybe associate with our grandparents, you know, either being members of trade unions, churches, or even at a much lower level, like a bowling club.
Speaker: Yeah. where Where did that concern come from? I mean, it's partly an outgrowth of the previous academic trajectory, I almost have to say, that I wrote a PhD about populism, particularly the history of American populism in the late 19th And that was a historical PhD, so a PhD written by a historian for historians.
Speaker: But I very quickly realized that writing a history about the late 19th century US 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 that's some remove from that original American debate.
Speaker: And i mean, I even wrote a book about contemporary populism as well, which came out with the first, so I don't know, three or four years ago. And to me, there was always an issue that many of the contemporary debates about populism, how we define the term, where it comes from, how you classify certain political movements with that metric, what the term of populism tells us about political culture in the 2020s and the twenty ten s But what quickly became very possible is that if you wanted to have any kind of structural explanation as to not the content, but the form that much politics took in the 2010s, which is, I guess, was the question that the notion of populism itself provokes, you have to talk about this enormously striking, and I wouldn't say it's under-examined or in any ways new phenomenon,
Speaker: of the, I mean, really anthropological mutation, I almost want to say, particularly in the developed West in the last 30 years, where certain era has seemingly come to an end and this associational fabric that previously made up most of the politics in the 20th century has been torn up and has disappeared.
Speaker: And it's it's something of a question that you ask to a fish about water insofar as it was such a self-evident, almost unexamined premise of much 20th century political culture as well.
Speaker: So whether you're talking about the left or the right, the kind of organizational or associational dimension of politics was something that people just took for granted. And it's only really in its absence or its disappearance in the last 20 years that you can fully probe the counterfactual situation, namely what does a politics without an associational basis looks like?
Speaker: So that was already a question for the work on populism, also in the late 19th century, then also in the book on left populism I wrote. And then in hyperpolitics, I think I tried to sharpen some kind of analytical model in how you might examine the disappearance of this associational layer in contemporary politics.
Speaker: And I think there's kind of a romantic or what you could call a Durkheimian view of what that associational debate should look like. There's a Tocquevillian tradition that's obviously more liberal and that's very much concerned with association as this There's also Karl Poirier, right? like a course. This idea of being markets being embedded and a kind of communitarian aspect to it as well. I mean, what like could you lay out the basic thesis of the book?
Speaker: I mean, I think it's an interesting, it's almost like a series of sort of Hegelian movements, right? Yeah. But in a very short time, instead of going over centuries, it's sort of decades. Yeah. Okay, the the slightly vulgar elevator pitch I can give is just a definition of what that term stands for.
Speaker: And hyperpolitics in the book stands for a change in political culture in the last 10 to 15 years as a process of repoliticization without reinstitutionalization. So that gives you two metrics or two axes, the politicization axis and the institutionalization axes.
Speaker: And those are aggregates of different kinds of indicators, different kinds of metrics. Politicization is obviously very hard to measure. It resists quantification, objectification. But if you look at voter turnout, if you look at protest activity, if you at least look at how frenetic activity become on the digital internet, there's a very clear sense in which you can at least say that tendentially there's been an increase in politicization in the last 10 to 15 years.
Speaker: That's the first political axis and then the second is the institutional axis and that is very much the aggregate of all the different types of associational affiliation we talked about before. So when you try
