How politics went hyper

The passions that once drove the left have faded, while the populist right marches on

In his 2002 memoir Interesting Times, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm offers a succinct definition of the 1900s. “Nothing is more characteristic of that century,” he notes, “than what my friend Antonio Polito calls ‘one of the great demons of the 20th century: political passion’.” Naturally, the question is personal to Hobsbawm. It is closely related to his reputation as an unreconstructed Stalinist, who refused to leave the Communist Party after the crises of consciences caused by the 1956 invasion of Hungary, which drove swathes of intellectuals away from communism. Avoidantly, Hobsbawm insists that his reasons for having stayed in the British Communist Party were emotional rather than rational – a fierce attachment to politics that he was never able to relinquish. In 2026, this problem of “political passion” has an uncanny resonance, at once immediately recognisable and hopelessly removed.

Later in his memoir, Hobsbawm offers a more visceral account of what such “political passion” entailed. In a passage, he recalls the last legal demonstration of the Communist Party of Germany, held on 25 January 1933. The event proved unforgettable for the historian, who 70 years later could summon the atmosphere:

“Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation. Unlike sex, which is essentially individual, it is by its nature collective, and unlike the sexual climax, at any rate for men, it can be prolonged for hours. On the other hand, like sex it implies some physical action – marching, chanting slogans, singing – through which the merger of the individual in the mass, which is the essence of the collective experience, finds expression… What I can remember is singing, with intervals of heavy silence… We belonged together. I returned home to Halensee as if in a trance… Five days later Hitler was appointed chancellor.”

Hobsbawm soon emigrated to England and spent most of his life as a historian. Beyond the confession, the memory offers some sense of the change in political culture in the second half of the 20th century. By the early 2000s Hobsbawm’s political passion is on the wane and he finds public engagement with political affairs less self-evident. Politics, let alone mass militancy, no longer seems on Westerners’ minds. The quantitative markers are there, from declining voter engagement to slumping strike activity. Voters’ interest in politics falls to record lows and disaffection with politicians becomes a persistent source of worry to political scientists.

Hobsbawm is hardly alone in his gloom. The German novelist Günter Grass reported from the other side of Berlin in his 1999 book My Century. There, he found youngsters of Hobsbawm’s age in 1933 dancing in 1994 at a very different kind of party. They too are walking through the centre of Berlin in a state of “mass ecstasy”. But for the attendants of the 1994 Love Parade, Grass notes, “no revolutionary slogans are required. Just peace – even if down there in the Balkans, in Tuzla and Srebrenica, they’re shooting up a storm… Here in Berlin the tomorrow generation will resume its ecstatic dancing next year and in the years thereafter.” At the end of this report, “a very mellow young man I talked to a few minutes ago had this to say: ‘The world’s beyond saving, but it can still party.’”

The two testimonies offer snapshots of their age: a world of mass politics characteristic of the mid-century – exemplified by Hobsbawm’s attachment to the Communist Party – and the so-called post-politics of the 1990s, in which public and private became separated, and politics is seemingly abandoned as an organised activity. Raves now seemed a more promising depository for the energy previously invested in mass organisation. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Grass’s Love Parade represented the post-political era. By 2010, however, the festival came to a sudden end: on 24 July, a crowd crush at a Love Parade held in the German town of Duisburg lead to the deaths of 21 people, with hundreds more injured. The organisers announced that no more Love Parades would be held.

Unconsciously, the timing for the decision proves symbolic: a year and a half before, the international financial system had crashed, causing mayhem in the European, American and Arab banking systems. As the Love Parade wound down, people began to gather on squares in Madrid, Athens and New York to protest the austerity packages being implemented. It is a telling change of scenery: as citizens leave the festivals, they flock to the squares. In the coming decade, political passion seems to make a spectacular return, with Time magazineelecting “The Protester” as their Person of the Year in 2011.

After the 2010s, the post-political diagnoses no longer appear plausible. Instead, a set of indicators point in a different direction: demonstrations and more extreme phenomena such as political violence, including assassination attempts, have increased. In the US, the post-George Floyd demonstrations in 2020 were among the largest in the country’s history, with some estimating 20 million participants; the 2020 presidential election saw the highest turnout of the 21st century. The data suggests an irresistible conclusion: the intensity of political activity has objectively increased.

Faced with this rise in intensity, commentators have taken to easy analogies: a return of the 1930s; the “darkest days” in our political history, with Maga likened to interwar fascism. The comparison is forgivable: a large part of contemporary mobilisation benefits the far right, whose electoral weight is increasing and coming to power in many countries.

Yet the analogy overlooks a significant difference. Admittedly, politicisation is on the rise, but another axis is collapsing: the institutionalisation of political life. Unlike in the 1930s, contemporary societies are experiencing a continuous erosion of organised structures: trade unions, political parties, associations, but also religious institutions. This trend, which took off properly in the 1990s, has continued unabated into the 2010s and 2020s.

The result is a scissor-shaped graph. On the one hand, intense political activity, as in the interwar period; on the other, institutional stagnation, inherited from the post-political decades. The crossing has no clear historical precedent. In a mutant form, Hobsbawm’s political passion has returned, but at much cheaper costs and with more ways to opt out than the commitments typical of the 20th century.

Nothing is more indicative of this re-enchantment than the political expression facilitated by the internet, which has radically lowered the cost of political expression. Whereas Hobsbawm’s generation required access to party officials and editors to voice their opinions, contemporary political expression is easy to carry out. Social media timelines are full of astonishingly aggressive political statements, but they come from anonymous individuals. While the mass politics in Hobsbawm’s memoir combined political passion within organisations, contemporary “hyperpolitics” finds it hard to translate it into durable institutional commitment.

How long will hyperpolitics last? Only a few years after it emerged, some have already tried to obituarise it. In a piece for the New York Times last year titled “Goodbye, ‘Resistance’”, Ross Barkan declared the end of the political engagement typical of the 2010s, when short-lived bursts of protest did not yet need to crystallise into organisations. Barkan saw it typified by the marches against Trump after 2016, attracting hundreds of thousands of participants but failing to build a new civil society or party structure. “Where has all the anti-Trump energy gone now?” Barkan asked. Meanwhile, politics appeared to be moving at pace, not least with the slew of executive orders of the new Trump administration and the rise of a new political party to the top of the opinion polls in Britain.

Barkan’s eulogy might have proved premature. Yet it nonetheless hints at an important question: there are signs that the right is seeking to rebuild the civic infrastructure necessary to move beyond the hyperpolitical impasse. Whether it is the pubs whose owners support Reform, or the Ice squadrons paid by the new Trump administration, these are institutions for a properly offensive politics, not just online atmospherics. Throughout the 20th century, the strength of the right was often a function of the strength of the left. We might see the original rise of fascism as an organised response to strength of the left; in the present, the right seems comfortably ahead on this score. Compare, for instance, the transformation of Reform into a mass-membership organisation with the chaotic half-launch of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party. How is it that forces of the right have proven more adept at riding the hyperpolitical wave, whereas the left has had so much difficulty capitalising on what Pankaj Mishra dubbed the new “age of anger”?

The first is structural. In any society, the benchmark of success on the right is just not as high as that of the left, just as Karl Marx noticed how the 19th-century Party of Order was able to consistently outmanoeuvre the Party of Progress. Rather than revolutionise the existing order, right-wing politics promises stability rather than change. It is unclear whether Reform will have ambitions for radical economic restructuring – changing the role of the Treasury, for instance – and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has long shelved its previous ambitions for a Frexit. The more ambitious parts of the right’s current programme – mass deportations, a demographic reordering of current societies – might prove more difficult to implement.

Secondly, the right enjoys a decisive advantage over the left in at least one domain: access to private funds. What look from afar like mass political movements are in reality top-down campaigns for elite pressure that seek allies on the level of the state. In this regard, the right can always outspend the left. For the less socially risky and more gradualist parts of the left’s programme, these tactics of elite whispering might suffice. Yet they run into limits when coupled with a more ambitious programme.

Meanwhile, although some of the right’s more extravagant promises were not fulfilled (a complete wall along the Mexican border, the Brexiteers’ “Singapore-on-Thames”), Trump did deliver on tax cuts, the UK left the European Union, and the EU’s external borders are becoming more heavily militarised. By comparison, left-wing hyperpolitics detonates like a neutron bomb: a moment ago, thousands of people were protesting in a square. Now they have vanished, with the assailed power infrastructure intact.

In this context the mass political party, capable of directing and institutionalising the passions Hobsbawm talked about, seems a period piece, if not a relic. And if politics is occurring without it, its recreation might seem little more than an experiment akin to the reconstruction of a mammoth with samples drawn from the Siberian permafrost: scientifically interesting, but practically pointless. Political success in this sphere is more a question of mobilising hyperpolitics than overcoming it.

Yet perhaps it might be possible to come up with a genetic hybrid. Such parties would operate at different speeds, as the Workers’ Party of Belgium, which opted for a three-tiered membership model. The first is an inner circle of classical militants with a permanent commitment to party work, both personal and financial (with half of parliamentary salaries deposited straight into party coffers). The second tier consists of monthly members who hold regular meetings but maintain personal lives next to the party, while the third tier are online members who can be mobilised in election time but are exempt from daily contributions. The approach comes with downsides: the party is a record spender on digital ads and relatedly trades its rhetorical emphasis on class for fulmination against political over economic elites. Yet unlike many other Belgian parties, it is still growing.

Such institutions would also allow politicians and activists to conceive of their actions on a longer timescale, rather than short media cycles. The “political passion” Hobsbawm once baptised as the hallmark of the 20th century might never see an integral return. Yet, conceding the bromide that one cannot step in the same river twice, the question of how party democracy could be reinvented for the new century is not just theoretical, but existential.

[Further reading: Is Bridget Phillipson really the most dangerous woman in Britain?]