Episode summary
Ezra Klein interviews historian Anton Jaeger about “hyperpolitics”, Jaeger’s term for a period of heightened political activity—voting, protest and even violence—paired with declining institutional attachment such as unions, parties and civic organisations. Jaeger argues that without stabilising institutions, politics becomes volatile and short-term, with mobilisation surging and fading rapidly and often failing to translate into durable policy outcomes.
Klein presses the role of online attention and algorithmic incentives, arguing that institutions and elites are themselves shaped by social media’s feedback loops. Jaeger resists mono-causal “the internet explains everything” accounts, but agrees platforms amplify and accelerate underlying social and political trends. They discuss whether people are truly more powerless today or simply more exposed to emotionally arousing information, and how low-cost online expression can substitute for higher-friction collective action.
The conversation turns to elite dynamics, including Jaeger’s claim that contemporary polarisation is often better explained by divisions within elites than by mass social polarisation. Jaeger also discusses a view—via Ivan Krastev—that Trumpism involves an “implosion” of time, describing governing oriented around the 24-hour news cycle. On the US right, he argues the second Trump term is more institutionalised than the first, while questioning whether Trumpism can persist without Trump. Klein and Jaeger contrast Western institutional “veto” structures with Chinese state capacity and output legitimacy, debating whether Western democracies are drifting towards a choice between rights without action and action without rights.
