One of the arresting aspects of the current conjuncture in the West is the scrambling of elite political culture. Across the Atlantic world, established codes of rule are no longer securely linked to actions or intentions—to such an extent that they have become illegible to the governing classes themselves. Trump’s conduct of world affairs is the most glaring example. Casual remarks—‘The negotiations are going great’—may turn out to signal the onset of war, or not. Exterminationist threats—‘A whole civilization will die tonight’—may indicate a ceasefire.footnote1 Trump is often read as the cause of every other world distemper, from the eu being at sixes and sevens to disarray over ai or strategic incoherence in the Middle East. Yet what if Trump himself were to be treated as only a symptom of a more general shift in ruling-class culture—albeit an indicator grave enough to generate its own knock-on effects?
The experience of society’s lower echelons may provide analogies for this elite disarray. The rise of new online forms of popular political culture in the West in the 2010s suggested the term ‘hyperpolitics’ to describe their lopsided intensity, after the ‘post-political’ 1990s.footnote2 As the hyperpolitical offensive gathered mass and speed in mid-decade, new genres of politics crystallized and old ones were remade: Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn, Sanders, Black Lives Matter, La France insoumise on the left; on the right, Golden Dawn, Vox, Farage, maga and Le Pen. Much of this remained a mode of engagement modelled on online life-worlds, characterized by volatile swarms and high emotions; ‘wars of manoeuvre’, with intermittent bursts of activism; frenetic cycles of outrage and burn-out; followers and witch hunts. Its electoral interventions were usually dependent on an influencer-style figurehead with outsize grip over the organization. Compared to the Weberian ideo-type of bureaucratic political rationality—the mode of the ministry and the briefcase—it was immediatist, rather than planning for the generations to come; focused on online messaging more than physical infrastructure. For all its furore, the hyperpolitical mode lacked the mass-political tools—above all, strong party forms—to effect concrete change.
Contrasted outcomes
Might the concept of hyperpolitics also help to detect and explain patterns of behaviour among the ruling classes—not just in the us, but in Europe as well? The contours of such an elite hyperpolitics can best be drawn by a contrast to the post-politics of the 1990s, above and below. Economically, the concerted capitalist offensive of the Thatcher–Reagan years left the working classes with stagnant wages, longer hours and growing debts. Socially and culturally, the aggressive marketization of everyday life and atomization of civil society, together with the evisceration of mass-membership parties, trade-union associations and public housing, produced a form of popular de-institutionalization. In class terms, these developments brought about both a complication and widening of existing social cleavages, yet these fractures rarely found lasting political reflection; they ushered in what the German sociologist Klaus Dörre termed demobilisierte Klassengesellschaften—‘demobilized class societies’.footnote3 Politically, 1989 saw the disappearance of whatever type of post-capitalist horizon was represented by state socialism—and the diminution of social democracy, as the former workers’ parties rebranded themselves as social liberals or ‘centre left’. The upshot for electoral politics in the 1990s was mass desertion from below, as Peter Mair was among the first to understand.footnote4
The outcome for the ruling classes proved no less momentous. Economically, the deregulatory 1990s brought soaring wealth and hot global-capital flows. Socially and culturally, the class of asset-owners expanded and diversified, welcoming fresh hordes of the new super-rich. Politically, as Mair also pointed out, the elites, too, were withdrawing from democratic engagement. Such desertion from above took a different form from its popular counterpart: not de-institutionalization, but ‘retreating into an official world’.footnote5 The institutions that came to the fore, dominating headlines in the 90s and early 2000s—the Federal Reserve, imf, World Bank, G7—were sealed off from popular pressures. Inversely, many of them were open to business influence, mediated by the sprawling lobby complexes in Washington and Brussels. For the latter, the post-Maastricht European Union was consciously constructed as a ‘depoliticized polity’, as Mair had it, insulated from the citizenry, even as supranationally agreed policies penetrated deeper into daily life with the launch of the Euro and exponential growth in eu directives.
For the ruling classes too, this was a ‘post-political’ age, if politics is defined as agonistic—the struggle over what modes of social organization should prevail in a given territory. All now elatedly agreed with Thatcher that there was ‘no alternative’, although a more emollient and optimistic, even ‘progressive’ social liberalism became the dominant outlook, epitomized by the Blairs and Clintons, untroubled by the spells in office of the centre rights. Governing elites maintained a tight hold over the hollowed-out mass-party forms, though advertising agencies, focus groups and opinion polls now replaced the party conference or local branch and regional structures in generating ‘the vision’. Party officials still performed recruitment and patronage functions, as gatekeepers on the path to political power; their partisan identities—colour, symbol, motto—still structured elections. But the parties of government increasingly became para-state vessels or vehicles for the donor class, no longer pretending to fulfil their traditional role of popular representation.footnote6 What an elderly Habermas described as the new structural transformation of the public sphere contributed a further degree of atomization.footnote7
This golden age for Western governing elites nevertheless bred potential problems for their class rule. First, the very transformation of asset wealth on which the new elite floated threatened to fracture the internal coherence of the ruling classes, for whom wealth, power and territory had traditionally gone hand in hand. The effects of economic globalization—bringing foreign-institutional ownership of national assets and the dilution of local capitalist classes, amid the swirl of international funds—has also broken the previous links of kinship and culture between state elites and asset-owners. This made further fractures likely, both with voters and with other capitalist sectors. The process was most extreme in Britain, where Thatcher’s 1986 ‘big bang’ deregulation of the financial sector blew up not only the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ of the City of London but also the provincial structures of local bank managers and Rotary Club businessmen whose families had staffed the intermediate ranks of the Conservative Party. The globalization of wealth, while politics remained residually national, introduced comparable intra-elite contradictions in other countries. Though France and Germany fought much harder to protect their ‘national champions’ in high-end engineering (the last British carmaker was sold off long ago), their banks nonetheless found American subprime mortgages more enticing. In the us, the state–capital nexus was less dependent on kith and kin, being robustly institutionalized in the lobbying industry that channelled corporate inducements to appropriate Congressional Committee members. But here, too, the onset of ruthless mergers and acquisitions, asset-stripping and outsourcing, helped to weaken links between enterprise and place.
Second, the desiccation of the mass-party capillary structures that once connected elected governments to local supporters has weakened rulers’ ability to forge hegemonic cross-class blocs or mobilize support for long-term business strategies. Instead, they have had to depend for persuasion on the mass media, themselves starting to suffer from lower viewing figures and declining circulation. Without adequate institutional instruments, governing classes would struggle to regularize elite-mass relations and project power downwards, or out into the country. Long before the 2008 financial crisis, popular backing had grown fickle and fleeting; electoral volatility, abstentionism and anti-incumbency were the new order of the day. In the aftermath of the crisis, as bailouts and qe translated into the famous K-shaped recovery—ballooning wealth of the asset rich, hardship for the middling strata—such contradictions became a liability. As votes for many governing parties cratered, the stage was set for the entry of hyperpolitical forces.
Radicalized incoherence
Did asset-owners also undergo a repoliticization in the 2010s, in step with the ferment from below? Yes, replies a report in the Harvard Business Review: ‘Almost everything about business today is political’:
When Delta Airlines stopped offering discounts to nra members following a 2018 school shooting in Florida, it was threatened with the withdrawal of fuel subsidies in Georgia. When Disney spoke up on lgbtq+ rights in Florida, it lost its special governance status and rights in the state. When h & m voiced concerns about cotton sourcing and human rights in China, its revenues in that country plummeted. When the Ukraine crisis broke, McDonald’s was forced to exit the business it had painstakingly built in Russia over a 30-year period.footnote8
The Harvard Business Review diagnoses the conundrum for American corporate elites: inequalities of wealth and income have become more obvious, generating differences of interest and opinion rapidly amplified on social media, while the workplace has become ‘a vehicle for socialization and self-expression’. The report concludes: ‘Choices that may have been clear-cut in purely economic terms—such as what business to be in, where to do business, whom to do business with, and even how to price goods or hire and promote employees—can now easily become complicated by politics.’
The origins of such discursive radicalization of the C-suites at Delta and Disney can be traced in part to the Democrats’ bid to offer ideological reparations for their handling of the financial crisis—famously epitomized in Obama’s boost to campus feminism with his 2011 ‘Dear Colleague’ letter about Title ix complaints, sent on the day he launched his second presidential campaign, with us unemployment running at 15 million. The transmission of diversity policies from university to business park was sped along by consultancies like McKinsey and incorporated in esg goals that began to take up significant space in company reports. Solidly mainstream politicians followed suit; in 2020, Nancy Pelosi and Keir Starmer had themselves photographed piously taking the knee. Liberalism’s rhetorical radicalization was naturally met by an equal and opposite reaction from the conservative side. In Trump’s first run, this sounded more radical notes—‘American carnage!’—than Pollyannaish Democrat dei. But the culture-wars play-by-play is of less interest here than the fact of elite ideological fracture, which such repoliticization served to intensify.
Another index is the increasing political polarity of American business elites. ceos traditionally acted as a reliable source of support for the Republican Party, yet some 25 per cent of them are now registered Democrats. The result is that ‘individuals comprising one of the most powerful interest groups—corporate elites—appear to be fracturing ideologically and to some degree even switching sides.’footnote9 As Dylan Riley noted in 2024:
Historically, the two-party system split the working class between Democrats and Republicans, with the resulting vertical blocs cemented by a combination of promised concessions and personalist demagogy. Once in power, though, the parties would typically jettison their electoral programmes and tack toward the centre. But what has occurred in the most recent period . . . are intra-party revolts on both the right and the left . . . This creates a dangerous situation for the rulers in which they cannot easily find a vehicle to re-establish equilibrium.footnote10
Together with the rise in elite factionalism comes pure individuation, as in the billionaire activism—Kochs, Adelsons, Trump himself—that has been a driving force in ruling-class polarization. As Herman Mark Schwartz puts it: ‘the strata of elites whose cooperation is necessary for making the system run’ now ‘prioritize their own private interests at the expense of their collective class interests.’footnote11
More than popular fury, elite incoherence is an understated variable in the political hubbub of the past few years. On both sides of the Atlantic, Western leaders are struggling—on the vertical plane—to win enough popular support to stay in office, let alone to build an enduring coalition with majoritarian buy-in. The Democrats’ inability to translate their green industrial strategy—promoting red-state provision of green-energy jobs—into electoral victory in 2024 was only the latest indicator of how difficult it is for elites to buy consent for their plans, amid voter volatility and anti-system challengers on right and left.footnote12 On the horizontal plane, meanwhile, the governing classes struggle to craft cohesion between different fractions of capital and help asset owners articulate interests across sectoral or geographic lines. This in turn renders strategic coherence difficult—something evident in the geo-economic tumult of the past year, from the tariff bonanza to the destruction of Gulf oil-and-gas infrastructure and terrorization of the low-wage migrant workforce. Rather than its cause, Trump the hyperpolitician is a consequence of this elite disarticulation, providing agency absent a stabilizing structural frame.
Europe’s disarray
What Trump catalyses, of course, is more incoherence, as the contemporary condition of Europe shows. Here, a set of pre-existing geopolitical and economic dependencies makes elite fracture and cross-class bloc failure far more disabling than in the us. Mainstream parties still hold power in Europe’s three largest countries, but their situation is precarious and—a sign of the hyperpolitical mood of the electorates—their leaders are deeply disliked. In Germany, Merz leads a directionless, ill-tempered coalition which collectively won only 45 per cent of the vote; his personal rating is on –64.footnote13 Though Germany is the de facto leader of the eu bloc, its ruling elites cannot muster enough cohesion and popular backing to relaunch their own export industries against Chinese competition and American energy pressure, let alone craft a continental strategy. In France, Macron’s government has lacked the parliamentary support to pass a budget since the legislative elections of 2024, where his coalition came third in the first round, behind Mélenchon and Le Pen.footnote14 In Britain, thanks to the first-past-the-post system and a right divided between Tories and Reform, Starmer’s Labour won a landslide of 411 seats (of 650) in 2024, with a mandate from only 20 per cent of the overall electorate, his popular vote down from Corbyn’s in 2019.footnote15
This lack of vertical backing for European rulers is in part explained by their inability to unite capitalist fractions behind a coherent strategy to recharge their stagnant economies, trapped between the diktats of the bond markets, a faltering Energiewende, regulatory burdens of the eu’s ‘compliance capitalism’, the growing weight of social care for the elderly, failing public infrastructure, unbeatably cheap Chinese manufacturing and the crippling, self-inflicted gas-price shock resulting from their culpable failure to structure and support a diplomatic answer to the Ukraine–Russia question. Instead of directly grappling with these problems, Europe’s governing classes are issuing a call to arms against Russia and greedily tallying the martial stock of poor war-torn Ukraine for the inventory of a future eu army.
In their switch to intense Ukrainophilia—having long disdained the country as a troublesome peripheral mendicant in need of harsh neo-imperial financial discipline: viz., the 2013 eu–Ukraine association agreement—otherwise bureaucratic figures like Merz and Starmer launch into the mode of hyperpolitics, their energy and enthusiasm delinked from material and political reality. Despite patent lack of popular support, their eagerness for military spending swings from aircraft carriers and fighter jets to the best possible intercontinental ballistic missiles, like an oligarch’s mistress comparing handbags or earrings. Yet they are no more capable of forging a coherent continental rearmament strategy than a national economic one. Paris insists such items should be Made in Europe, in other words, by France’s high-end aerospace companies; Berlin complains those firms go over budget and take forty years to deliver; London, with its New Labour-commissioned aircraft carrier permanently laid up for repairs, keeps its fingers crossed that Washington will see it through.
The eu has no lack of coordinating institutions—Commission, Council, Ecofin, Parliament, Trilogue System and so forth; not to mention the ecb and ecj—in which the mainstream parties’ control of the system assures them a consensual majority. What it does not have is a strategy that European social blocs could recognize as representing their interests, informed by—and propagated through—deep-rooted party formations. No aggregator of that kind, capable of both articulating a coherent eu business interest and constructing a popular base that would support it, is in view. The consequences are plain to see. Instead of negotiating a lasting peace with Russia that would respect Ukraine’s self-determination, the eu debate revolves—behind closed doors—around what credit system its member states should use to arm against their great continental neighbour. Accompanying this are sly attempts by each to stay in the Pentagon’s good books with logistics and supply for the Trump–Netanyahu war of aggression against Iran, while posturing about a rules-based international order.
The work of eu whisperer Luuk van Middelaar and his Brussels Institute for Geopolitics (big) offers a telling illustration of this lurch into hyperpolitical militarism. In the 2000s, Van Middelaar celebrated the eu’s ‘canny politics of depoliticization’, which sublimated the continent’s history of internecine warfare into ‘interminable negotiations over trade, raw materials and farm subsidies.’footnote16 Today he appears as the Old World’s Elbridge Colby, helping European rulers regain a relish for power while big readies them for a new era of geo-economics. Instead of a rigid politics of rules, the eu’s speciality, he urges it to pursue a short-termist ‘politics of events’. The institutional vehicle for this would be a revamped European Defence Agency, the forum where national defence officials can commune on a shared agenda. Van Middelaar would upgrade it on the model of the Eurogroup, the conclave where Eurozone finance ministers chose a primus inter pares to guide their confidential discussions during the Eurozone crisis, under Wolfgang Schäuble’s watchful eye.
The analogy is a revealing one. The Eurogroup exemplified the governing classes’ retreat from democratic engagement and was roundly attacked during the crisis as an opaque elite club, lacking any accountability or public scrutiny, where ministers deliberated, in an atmosphere of informal conviviality, on budget cuts which condemned millions of eu citizens to unemployment or destitution. In big’s blueprint, the eda would assist in preparing the same citizens for war, through ‘intellectual rearmament’ as much as military bookkeeping. Opinion polls may report backing for great ‘strategic autonomy’, but Europe’s electorates have hardly mandated their leaders to rush into a continental arms race. Van Middelaar’s instant politics offers a mirror of the incoherence of European thinking—rearmament on American terms, here dressed in sovereigntist garb. It is symptomatic of the lack of a cohesive perspective through which European elites might transcend national and sectoral divides and achieve some agency in the new Trumpian universe.
Hyperpolitics in office
If this is roughly the structural background of elite hyperpolitics—repoliticization, under conditions of a fracturing ruling class—what is the political form of Trumpism 2.0? During his first term, Trump struggled to find his feet in the White House. Astonished by his victory, frightened by the remit of the Special Counsel’s investigation, hemmed in by officials who would give evidence for his impeachment, subject to leaks from the Oval Office, his presence was largely dysfunctional.footnote17 Once ejected from it, he was free to plan, and a team of loyalists (Miller, Vought, Wiles) worked out how to use the levers of power. January 2025 arguably initiated a new era wherein, for the first time, a hyperpolitical oppositionist entered office equipped with the means to manage the executive apparatus. Trump’s hyperpolitics in office thus involves a hybrid formation: an unstable compound of the typical Trumpian theatrics—an old-fashioned showman of the Fox News era, combining a protean political identity (Huey Long to Emperor Nero) and a skilful pivot to social media—with the bureaucratic rationality of the Armed Forces and Homeland Security. The admixture is hardly chemically pure. Moreover, it now extends the mode of hyperpolitics onto the terrain of foreign policy; a hyper-geopolitics, if you will.
Others have investigated the concrete outcomes of Trump’s second term to date.footnote18 The remit here is to register what it indicates—beyond the purée of right-wing policies cooked up by the Heritage Foundation—as a modality of rule. The most salient feature is surely its politique événementielle—in van Middelaar’s coinage, ‘a politics of events’. If the nation-state typically takes the long- or medium-term as its yardstick, Trump has instead presided over a radical contraction of political time. As Ivan Krastev has noted:
The essence of the Trumpian revolution is . . . the implosion of time itself. Trump shows no interest in anything that has happened before him and is unconcerned with what will transpire after him. He acts as if history must come to a screeching halt when he exits the stage. This helps explain why he believes that all wars should be stopped in weeks, if not days. Trump’s experience of time is central to his political behaviour. The president doesn’t think in terms of long-term strategy but rather in terms of deadlines. He’s like a director who does not shoot films but only trailers for movies that will never be made . . . . Trump’s revolutionary sense of time, in the absence of any revolutionary project, is a source of both strength and vulnerability. He weaponizes the public’s growing sense of urgency. The existential anxiety that ‘there is no time’ forestalls the question: ‘Time for what?’footnote19
What if one were to explain this short-termism as a structural product and not just a personal quirk? As Jonathan White has noted, the disappearance of cross-class institutions in the post-political 1990s has also made it harder for elites to conceive of a shared future which would guarantee grip over a present open to alteration; the mass party had been ‘a necessary vehicle to mediate between futures near and far, between what is currently achievable and what is ultimately desirable.’footnote20 In a similar vein, Avner Offer has suggested that the blurring of the public-private divide has fused the older timeline of state policy with the instantaneous cycles of private markets.footnote21 An increasing unplannability, or incapacity to gather elites around a long-term project, is one of its most visible symptoms. This is indeed a politics purely of events, whose primary concern is the impact any decision may have on the American media cycle—the revenge of Baudrillard’s vision of us politics as permanent spectacle.
Two compounding consequences of this décalage deserve attention. First, the reading proposed does not imply elite control over the social surplus has somehow diminished; there are good grounds to say it has increased.footnote22 Yet the political unmooring of Western elites has widened the gaps between different fractions of capital and made long-term planning across them more difficult. Hence Krastev’s wonder over Trump’s ‘revolutionary sense of temporality’—an actor who has mercilessly seized on the apertures left by vanishing elite integrators, whose smash-and-grab politics at least promises direct gain. As the model hyperpolitician, Trump seems to offer easy rewards in the sordid struggle over rents.
Secondly, elite deracination also implies a fractious chain of command between leaders and their capitalist constituencies. Trump has indeed managed to gather a select but robust subsection of American capital under his wing—fossil industries, higher ends of private equity, exurban middle management—along with some sections of an ‘uncredentialled’ post-industrial working class. In a typical distributional skew, rising oil prices might have beneficial effects for some of the monied constituencies in the Trump coalition. Yet they are hardly the controlling actors; neither the abduction of Maduro nor l’affaire Greenland seem to have found direct support amongst them. While Trump himself loudly proclaimed the Venezuelan coup an oil grab, American petroleum executives were by no means keen on an intervention which would increase global supply. Given the hyperpolitical tremor, it is unclear how stable and lasting Trump’s cross-class coalition can be. Its fragility is already visible in the plummeting approval ratings that have accompanied his debacle in Iran. A politics of mole-whacking crises and headline grabbing, rather than elite planning, is its correlate.
How much of all this will prove ephemeral, as the hyperpolitics diagnosis would predict? Trump is famously uninterested in legislation. Tellingly, many of his most oxygen-sucking domestic policies to date have already been dialled back. doge has been wound up and Federal re-hiring begun. Most of the tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court and repayment is under way. Hundreds of executive orders are stymied in the courts. Ostentatious cruelty remains a signal feature: though the ice invasion of cities was brought back to levels of brutality not so far from Obama’s, the gulag of detention centres across the South is spreading. Hyper-geopolitics will undoubtedly leave its mark; Trump’s backing for the Israeli agenda of regional carnage has inflicted a trail of death and destruction from Gaza to Lebanon, Yemen and Iran. Looting Venezuela, starving Cuba, fuelling the Russia–Ukraine war he pledged to stop; how far this departs from us business as usual will be a matter for future historians to decide.
Hyper-stability?
The discoordination of the Atlantic ruling classes finds its photographic negative in the stability of their Chinese counterpart. Over the past decade, the ccp has if anything increased its hold over China’s state and society—an intensification of the ‘party-state’.footnote23 It has thereby sired a successor to the ‘depoliticized politics’ which Wang Hui saw as the rule for both East and West in the 1990s and 2000s.footnote24 Xi’s China presents a new, distinctly twenty-first-century genre of party politics, neither Maoist nor Dengist—and visibly different from the hyperpolitics preponderant in the West.
The economic consequences of this institutionalism are now on spectacular display. Given the decentralized nature of the Chinese state, with regulatory signals sent from Beijing to the provinces, it could be said to constitute a European Union that works. Hence a striking ellipsis in much recent discussion on ‘abundance’ in the us: jealous admiration for the achievements of the Chinese engineering state against the us’s lawyerly society, yet no mention of the organ that assures these achievements.footnote25 The aporetic silence is not surprising. If Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are serious about rekindling American supply-side progressivism, or eu whisperers want to maintain the continent’s standing, they should at least think about what Washington and Brussels’s answer to the ccp’s new party-state would look like—not a ministry masquerading as a party, or the clannish office politics of the Commission.
It is hard to see the green developmental surge of the last ten years as separate from the ccp’s stranglehold over Chinese society, which has enabled it to stave off both populism and hyperpolitics à la chinoise. In particular after covid, the party has reinserted itself into every level of the Chinese polity, re-establishing itself as a regulator for elite-mass relations—whether through repression, surveillance or economic buy-out—and an instrument of cohesion for different elite factions, whose biographies are intimately tied to the party. That the ccp’s Five Year Plan may now be a better indicator of world macro-economic prospects than policy briefs from Brussels or Washington is a telling sign of the divergence.footnote26
Under capitalism, political cultures are anything but static. Some analysts may detect signs of a new bifurcation in the commitment to modest but achievable goals—hypo-policies?—of the Mamdani-mayoralty or the psoe–Sumar foreign policy in Spain. Tech suzerain Peter Thiel has already evinced nostalgia for the post-political era: Americans are increasingly ‘looking to politics to solve problems’, with a ‘relentless intensification of politics’ as consequence, he bemoaned. Instead, ‘it would be healthy if we had elections in which fewer people voted.’footnote27 His concern is understandable. In the us, hyperpolitics acts as a solvent of elite stability; in Europe, it deepens the fractures of which it is a symptom. Barring coherent re-institutionalization at either the top or bottom of society, however, elegies for the hyperpolitical era will prove premature.