What ‘Hyperpolitics’ Explains About This Era

Behind the intense political movements of the last decade, from Trumpism to wokeness and back again, there’s a strange and erratic rhythm. Movements saturate the culture seemingly overnight, only to evaporate or spark backlash just as rapidly. We’re extremely politically engaged, yet we’ve rarely felt so powerless to create lasting policy change. I haven’t seen many very successful attempts to explain what is driving this volatility. But one concept that has taken off recently, and captures what so many of us are feeling, is “hyperpolitics.” The idea comes from Anton Jäger, a historian and contributing writer to New York Times Opinion. In his book “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences,” Jäger theorizes what it means to live in a moment marked by hyper-engagement — high voter turnout, mass protests, trends that flare up and fade with extreme rapidity — yet where institutional trust is low, institutional relationships are decayed and people are disconnected from the structures that make political efforts stick. I think Jäger’s theory cuts to the core of this political era. So I invited him on the show to break down what hyperpolitics is, how we got here and what it actually takes to build lasting change today.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:24Ezra Klein?

  One of the hardest things to do is describe the overall shape, texture, rhythm of a political era. We'll talk about wokeness.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Woke one was crazy.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Woke one was crazy.

• 0:39Ezra Klein?

  We'll talk about Trumpism.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  I was saved by God to make America great again.

• 0:48Ezra Klein?

  But getting at the overall form in which they all take place is really, really difficult. One idea for this that has taken off a bit recently that have been hearing a lot around me is hyper-politicization. Hyper-politics is a concept from Anton Jaeger. He's a historian and contributing writer at New York Times Opinion. And he's also the author of this book, Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences. And what he's describing is an era in which politics feels like it is everywhere. The intensity of political opinion and commitment is really, really, really high, that things are swinging wildly from one side to the other. But things are not securely attached to political institutions and structures.

• 1:32Ezra Klein?

  And so these powerful periods of intense mobilization don't seem to have lasting consequence. I think it's a really interesting way of trying to get at what is happening behind what we're all feeling. He joins me now.

• 1:53Ezra Klein?

  Anton Jaeger, welcome to the show.

• 1:55Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 1:57Ezra Klein?

  So let's just begin at the beginning. What is hyperpolitics?

• 2:01Speaker 04

  Hyperpolitics is a concept that describes a change in political culture in the West, in which we see an increase in political activity on a variety of metrics, whether it's voting, protest, but also political violence. But that increase in political activity is not matched by an increasing institutional strength. So if you look at the indices of union membership, party membership, or other civil society organizations, those have stagnated or have continued to decline. And that is a situation, I think, which doesn't really have a proper precedent across the 20th century, maybe also not the 19th. And for that reason, I introduced the concept to make sense of a new confusing political present.

• 2:45Ezra Klein?

  So you're describing a situation in which people and moments feel more political. In some cases, they're doing more political things. You have huge mass protests, like in Black Lives Matter. But there is a de-institutionalized reality to politics. They're not parts of parties in the way they once were. Union civic organizations are in decline. And so they're not civically or institutionally attached. It's this kind of mixture of political activity absent institutional membership?

• 3:19Speaker 04

  That's right. Yes. And of course, the story I'm telling is a historical one, and it comes with contrasts. So if you're using these two axes, politicization, as I call it, and institutionalization, you can get a certain chronology of political forms as well. So I talk about the mass politics of the 20th century, which could be highly politicized, particularly, let's say, the 1920s and 1930s, but was also very heavily institutionalized. So to be politically active often meant to be in an institution. And I contrasted also to the post-politics of the 1990s, of the 2000s, as it's called, in which you had a decline on both of those indices. So low institutionalization and low politicization. And what we're looking at now indeed is this strange scissor

• 4:02Speaker 04

  shape, namely, a lot of political activity has also become easier, and it's become more necessary to pursue it. But it doesn't really have an institutional form, so it feels very incorrect. And as I claim, that also means it doesn't have as many policy consequences as it used to have.

• 4:19Ezra Klein?

  So I don't want to question your definition of your own concept. But one thing I feel like that doesn't quite pick up on, but which is part of why this idea has resonated, is the hyperness of hyperpolitics. This feeling of things rising and falling with incredible rapidity. It's like one year, you're deep inside Black Lives Matter and wokeness, and then it's like the vibes have shifted to Trump, and then, you know, they come all the way back. Nothing seems to last, but everything seems incredibly important. You have a very thoughtful, iconic style here. But I want to get at this kind of frenzied nature of it, which you do describe in the book.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Yes. So I think the volatility or the frenzy you're pointing at is a quintessential feature of the phenomenon I'm describing. Because what do institutions do with political activity? They stabilize it, and they give it longevity over a longer time period. And if you don't have these institutions to tie your political action to, and also not, let's say, the mechanisms of delegation or representation that come with these institutions, I'd say also maybe discipline. That means that short-termism is the de facto mode of a lot of political action. Because you can be enormously interested, invested in one question for a couple of weeks, you follow the media cycle. But then, once, let's say, the popularity fades, or it doesn't

• 5:45Speaker 04

  seem as urgent, you move on to the next thing. And there's no institution that's actually there to set the agenda, to help you articulate a long-term vision that might unite your politics across all these short-term issues. So the hyper has both a spatial and a temporal side to it. Spatial insofar as it can go everywhere, and it can gather loads and loads of people. I mean, there are record numbers in terms of turnout, not just in the US, but across the West, for protests in the last 10 to 15 years. But it's also hyper in that it doesn't cover a very long time span. And almost like a political market, you can invest in a product, and then when you see that its value is plunging, you can dump your shares and you can move on to the next issue.

• 6:29Ezra Klein?

  One of my critiques of the book is that you often will gesture at what seems very obvious about this to me, which is that this is digital politics. This is online politics. This is algorithmically mediated politics. You write about hyperpolitics. It is dynamic, intense, and polarizing, yet also ideologically diffuse, visibly modeled on the fluidity of the online world. You don't spend much time in the book describing or theorizing the fluidity of the online world. But I want to spend some time on it here, because the politics you are describing, a politics I recognize and live through, this just feels like not even what institutions are or are

• 7:11Ezra Klein?

  not able to do now, as much as politics, which is fundamentally downstream of what we pay attention to. And our attention is fundamentally shaped now by algorithms that care about controversy, that care about newness, that are hunting amorally and constantly for whatever will get a rise out of people. And if you build politics on that completely bizarre superstructure of attention, this is what you get.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  I'm broadly in agreement, and I don't think it necessarily contradicts or is in friction with the thesis I'm defending. I'm a bit hesitant about a lot of views, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years, that assign not just a primary, but as we say, a monocausal role to digital technology, where somehow the internet explains everything. And then the book shouldn't have been called hyperpolitics, but just extremely online politics. And then it's just a book about the digitalization or the increasingly digital nature of our political lives. I want to resist that collapse, or I want to resist equating hyperpolitics just with extremely online politics. For the reason that many of the theories we've had, let's say,

• 8:28Speaker 04

  that tried to describe the Brexit vote or the Trump vote through something like Russian bots or bought Facebook ads, there was, of course, during the Arab Spring already, a theory that these were so-called Facebook revolutions, that it was digital platforms that were really driving the upsurge. But also recently, the idea that the reason social media is playing this role is primarily because it's the only thing we pay attention to. And I don't think that's very compelling. For the very reason that you also have to pay attention to the environment in which digital media was launched. And there, it's not as if social media did all the work on itself. It's more that the civic or social landscape in which it entered, it found a population that was ready to experience so

• 9:13Speaker 04

  much of politics online. Of course, these algorithms are addictive, but the question is always, why does it stick? Why are people so taken to it? And at the same time, a lot of the reason there are protests doesn't just have to do with hallucinations online. These are very, very real and very important topics, whether it's mass incarceration or police violence in the US. Let's say inequality, but surely on the right, they'd say migration. And these are not simply things that digital platforms have somehow conjured up out of nothing. It's more that I think social media has acted as a magnifying glass and an accelerator of certain trends that came before, but which I think surpassed the digital. And if we reduce everything to the digital, we are only having

• 9:58Speaker 04

  a conversation about platforms when I think it should be a much broader conversation.

• 10:01Ezra Klein?

  I always think of the conversation about what you're calling digital as a conversation about attention. And you can have that conversation well or poorly. And I agree with you, dissolving things down into Russian bots or Facebook ads is ridiculous. I didn't believe that in the 2016 election. I don't believe it now. But let me push this a little bit because when I say it's my critique of the book, I don't mean I think you have it wrong in the book. I actually just wish there was a chapter on it in the book. And one thing I was thinking about as I read the argument you're making about institutions is, well, what do I see happening with the institutions we have today?

• 10:42Ezra Klein?

  Because it's not as if all institutions are gone or nobody is part of a party. You can look at the DSA, which is rising in America and is has a real institutional formation. There are people who devote their lives to the Democratic Party, to the Republican Party. And one thing I would say about all of these people, not literally every individual, but many of them, is they exhibit the tendencies of hyper politics even more than normal people do. Right? The tendency to get overly invested in what gets called online, the current thing, to have like incredible waves of sentiment, but then not be able to kind of translate it over a long period of time.

• 11:25Ezra Klein?

  The sort of tendency to look back on something like two or three or four or five years ago, something recent and think, oh, my God, what were we just doing? Right? Famously, AOC just gave an interview where she said woke one was crazy.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  I have a local city councilman that has this saying, woke one was crazy.

• 11:43Ezra Klein?

  Woke one was crazy. Okay, that's true.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  And I think that what's important is that we have to assess what.

• 11:51Ezra Klein?

  Was it? I mean, did the movement go too far with some of those positions? I mean, you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think, I think that during this time and during, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that had that were had in that time were quite fruitful.

• 12:29Ezra Klein?

  I think what she's describing there is the way online politics led ideas that are real and rooted in the real world to sort of take some forms and be expressed in ways that people no longer wish to defend. And so the way I think there's a connection here is that the people even who are institutions and the way institutions work and collectivities work, those people are also communicating with each other online and tweeting at each other and retweeting each other. Donald Trump communicates with the Republican Party through Truth Social. So sort of saying there are these two spheres, institutions and the digital world, it doesn't

• 13:11Ezra Klein?

  feel real to me. I watch people who lead these institutions communicating with each other through this digital world and thus see institutions end up in a kind of like the same sort of back and forth, slightly wild oscillation quality.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  Yes, it's very clear that the types of politicization that are typical of the contemporary world also have an effect on how people affiliate with institutions. There, I would say, hyper politics obviously moves at different speeds in different groups. So with the political professional and the, let's say, voter who maybe hasn't voted in a couple of elections and isn't professionally involved in politics, obviously hyper politics is going to have very different effects. So the volatility or the short termism, which we detect in the general population and their relationship to politics, will also find its counterpart even with subjects that find themselves in these institutions, which I think is a striking illustration for AOC,

• 14:10Speaker 04

  but could make the argument for a couple of other figures as well, is that the reason one can easily rescind certain positions or then step back on commitments that were made quite vociferously a couple of years ago, is that there doesn't really seem to be a solid ideology behind many of these political choices and preferences. And, and this is important for an institutional side of the story, there isn't a sort of program to which you can tie yourself. And across the 20th century, I mean, political parties always had leaders or certain charismatic figures that led them forward. They always had people that were more individualized as a member of their party than others. But at the same time, there was a program around which everyone could orient themselves.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  And this means that changing or reneging on some of those aspects of that program came with, with costs. And the question with AOC is, well, she has a relationship to the DSA. The DSA is obviously not an official political party. It's a socialist organization. But the question is, what is the DSA's program she's listening to or she feels she has to be accountable to? And how can they discipline her when she then decides that she now wants to pursue a different political path? And I think that's the hyper politics at different speeds I'm talking about. In the general population, it's, let's say, hopping from one theme to another. But even for political professionals, it means a decline in ideological consistency, or even the question of what is my party line or what is my long-term vision for the transformation of society?

• 15:37Ezra Klein?

  You tell a historical story in the book about these other periods in politics, and maybe it's worth sitting in one of them for a few minutes, which is practically mass membership politics. And I think you're more describing European political parties in this than American political parties, which have always been somewhat different. But it's such a different world to try to mentally inhabit if you're an American and, you know, the year 2026, that I'd like you to sort of draw that picture, that what it was like to be at least in some of these parties, you know, in this other period that you're describing.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  So the portrait I'm painting is very much reliant on cases on the left, but I also want to highlight that it's not exclusive to the left. There are right wing variants of this. But the case was that to be a member of a political party was not something optional and was often something that was handed down in families. So it was hereditary in many cases. Describing it as voluntary is almost tricky insofar as the social stigma for leaving a party or for not voting for it would be quite severe. You might have to move out of your neighborhood. And at the same time, it also meant that your electoral choice was very much a function of your institutional membership.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  There was no question who you were going to vote for because you were already a member. And this means that your political preferences were completely determined by the affiliation. And that obviously also meant that the party had a lot of control over your private lives as well. So there are cases in the 1970s, for example, that members of the French Communist Party were not allowed to buy certain cars or drive them. Of course, Christian democratic parties had very strong views on, let's say, what happened in the bedroom. And it was a very authoritarian world in many cases as well. I don't want to pretend as if it was egalitarian, as if people had complete control over these parties, but membership was immersive. It was something that could last a lifetime and for which

• 17:39Speaker 04

  the exit costs were quite high. Now, of course, the US is very different because the US never developed mass parties in the way that Europe did. That probably had to do with the fact that the US democratized very early. At the same time, I want to resist the idea that American parties haven't been profoundly transformed in the last 50 to 60 years, the period I'm covering. Because even as parties that are more part of the state than of society, they still had this hinterland of civil society organizations, particularly in the case of the Democratic Party, for example, unions or different minority group interests.

• 18:16Ezra Klein?

  The Black Church would be a good example of this, I think.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Yes. And of course, religious institutions are massive, massively important and have been for both parties for a while now. But even as that hinterland has started to shrink or desiccate, that also meant that even American parties that are not mass parties have reconfigured their relationship to society as a whole. And they now fulfill a very, very different function than they did across the 20th century. Of course, as I say, it is a different story because there never was the membership model as we knew it in Europe. And this means that the story of hyper politics, American style, has to be told differently than the European variant.

• 18:54Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that I thought about reading that part of the book, and you're signaling it here, is that I think at a high gloss, that sounds good to people, right? This idea that we have hollow political parties now and everything just moves too fast. You can't stretch ideology over an actual structure of civic belonging and civic membership and civic action. But these much more totalizing parties that you describe, it led to a lot of horror, among other things. And you sort of gesture at the parties of the right, fascist parties,

• 19:32Ezra Klein?

  the Nazis, that it is the case that ideology could bring you into a much more immersive world where the cost of exit was much higher and the pressure for total ideological indoctrination was more constant. So is this a thing to look back on with nostalgia? I mean, indoctrination is not a concept I think we look back on with a lot of fondness and having a party sit there and tell me how I should look at everything in the world and be able to socially or possibly professionally in patronage models punish me if I don't look at it that way. That's not a world I'm so eager to live in either.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  No, so I talked about the inagilitarian aspects of that system. The book also wants to maintain a focused ambiguity without too much nostalgia about what this world was, how unpleasant it could be for certain people. It starts, of course, with portraits of figures in the 90s and 2000s who are happy to be liberated from that world, who also experience a degree of individual freedom, precisely because those institutions don't dominate their lives anymore. And also with the idea that one cannot clone a dinosaur, so we cannot take the DNA of those parties and implement them in the present and hope that they will revive and survive the current environment. At the same time, it is also very clear that there is a question of power there.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  People don't simply join institutions because they don't want to be lonely. That's also a reason, and I think it's part of the story that the book also tells, in the crisis of sociability. The loneliness epidemic, as it's called, is obviously also a part of the deinstitutionalization the book is trying to analyze. But except for the sociability element, parties are also guarantees of collective power. I mean, they're instruments for collective action. And as they have declined, and as sometimes their immersive or totalitarian aspects have disappeared, there has also been an increasing difficulty of translating individual preferences into collective action, particularly in the West. I think there are a few exceptions to this, maybe China and India, that do have these weird mass parties left, but for the rest, the decline of parties has gone hand in

• 21:43Speaker 04

  hand with inability or declining gradient of popular power, particularly from below.

• 21:49Ezra Klein?

  Can you expand on that? That's a thing people sometimes say and then move very fast. Defend that position for me, that somebody sitting around in American politics in 1973 or 1954 was more capable of translating individual politics into collective power into governmental reform?

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Well, there is political science research about this, so obviously about the negative correlation, for example, between public preferences and policy results. So, I mean, the typical case, for example, is Medicare for All, where there has been a majority for now for a while, but the chance of it getting implemented. And it is very clear that the 1930s-

• 22:28Ezra Klein?

  But this is a very, this is a very weak example. Different states, I've covered these fights. Medicare for All, you pull it, it pulls high, you then tell people, here's what the taxes will be, your insurance is going away, it pulls low. And it's a very common thing, that you have a complex policy, you can frame it at the outset, and people are like, great, and it's a gigantic change, and they are very, very afraid when you begin actually putting the change on them. So, in this comparative take you're making, like, I want to hear this defended, that we were so much better at getting what we wanted politically in another era. I found a lot of the political science on this one, I do read it a little bit confused. So, that's why I'm pushing this point before we just escape by it.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's also important to keep in mind that this is not the only factor feeding into this capacity. There is a question of state capacity, there are other kind of channels that need to be examined, there is just one element, namely, how has the decline of these institutions negatively affected the capacity for policy change? And I do think if you look at the heyday, let's say, of what is called the New Deal Order in the 1930s and the 1940s, when the American welfare state, which was never as spectacular as the European variant, was built, there is a very clear correlation with mass power there at the time. And it is also very, very clear that after McCarthyism, and particularly after the subduing of the civil rights movement, the fall of this mass power goes hand in hand with the

• 23:49Speaker 04

  difficulty of actually getting concessions, particularly from America's business class. Now, in Europe, it's different, but it's also very clear that, for example, Europe's welfare states were not just built by technocrats, but were built through the exercise of mass pressure. Now, once again, mass pressure is not an intrinsic good, it can have very negative consequences, but at the same time, there, to me, very, very clearly is the case that the set of social rights that were built up in Europe and the US in the middle of the century were also a function of mass power, not only a function of mass power. I mean, it seems indisputable to me that the decline of union power in the US probably has something to do with the staggering levels of inequality that the US currently has.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  Now, it's a correlation, and then the causal mechanism is complicated, but I think that's one illustration of how, let's say, institutional power can translate into policy results, more concretely.

• 24:45Ezra Klein?

  One of the reasons I'm pushing on this is that I think there is a widespread view, and I think this view is correct, that people feel particularly powerless over politics right now. And so, then, like, the next step in thinking about that view is whether it is a perception or whether it is true. And, you know, I would tell the story you just told a little bit differently, right? You have an American political system that is very resistant to kinds of reform for very, very long periods of time. The Great Depression fractures the system. It functionally annihilates the Republican Party for a period of time. FDR does not pass all that policy because all of a sudden, union density jumps.

• 25:27Ezra Klein?

  FDR passes all that policy because there is a level of democratic dominance over Congress that is unimaginable to us today. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, where you have another big period of expansion of the welfare state, comes after Kennedy is assassinated, Kennedy is not getting things done, the civil rights movement is stymied for a very long time by southern power over Congress, the filibuster is used basically exclusively to stop civil rights bills for, you know, decades in American politics. And so you have these sort of punctuated moments when a lot can get done, but they tend to come for unusual reasons. Now, I'm not saying mass power is important in that, and I do agree with you, by the way, that union density is a reason we've had inequality rise, the causality that,

• 26:11Ezra Klein?

  as you say, people can argue over. The reason I bring all this up is that one of the things that does not always seem obviously true to me is that the average person had so much more power in these times. Like, you needed this sort of moment, and then, like, the, you know, the overdone window cracks open, and all of a sudden, a bunch of things happen, but it's very, very contingent. It's not a linear process in which the work you're doing as a citizen, day in and day out, is feeling it is getting anywhere most of the time. One of the things, going back to attention, which I just think is under-theorized in politics, so much as we do talk about it, is that people today, they know so much more

• 26:52Ezra Klein?

  about the world, they know so much more about it so constantly than they could before. So, you have all of this information, and the information is now tuned to be much more arousing emotionally than it was at another time. One of the things that I suspect is it is the mixture of how much you know and how much you are being made to feel at all moments. Mix in with, like, the powerlessness that actually is real, right? The amount of power an individual has, and then the amount of institutions you're tied to is low, that creates this feeling that everything is being done without your consent, without your control, there's no way for you to affect it. In America now, with this sort of red-blue system, where you live in a blue state, and,

• 27:36Ezra Klein?

  you know, your vote barely matters in national elections, you know, same thing in very red states, right? Everybody knows how your state is going to go, so what does it matter how you vote? That I think we always want to put this as a question of individual capacity, but is it a question of individual capacity, or is it a question of the amount you're being pulled into politics, and then your absence of capacity conflict with each other for you?

• 28:02Speaker 04

  Yes, to both, with some modifications, maybe, I'd say. So, for the first, I think that individual powerlessness is also not completely without precedent, so the heyday of mass politics in, for example, the 30s and 40s, maybe a bit in the 50s, was also the start of the nuclear race, which to many people seemed as the supreme expression of powerlessness in the 20th century, is the most anti-democratic weapon, as George Orwell said. So, it's not as if that wasn't with us before. And I also don't want to pretend as if re-institutionalization or rebuilding those institutions today will automatically mean that they, it will become easier to implement certain policies, because there is also a question of where power has moved, even on the level of the state.

• 28:43Speaker 04

  So, I don't think that in the 50s and 60s, let's say, unelected bodies, both in Europe and the US, like central banks, had as much power as they do today, and they're not, let's say, subject to popular pressure or even electoral pressure in the same way. So, there's no immediate guarantee, and it's one factor among many. So, you do, I think, have to have certain coalitions within the elite, together with mass power, to get some of these policy results done. And it could also be that the constellation is favorable, and then it turns out that it works. I do think that one of the most important factors in the policy blockage we're witnessing across both sides of the Atlantic in the last 20 years is that the factor of mass power

• 29:25Speaker 04

  has been severely reduced, even as politicization has risen, and that probably explains why it's become more difficult. When it comes to the paradox of increasing visibility, or the dynamics of contemporary political mobilization, I fully agree. I mean, the kinds of footage you can now get beamed onto your smartphone screens, whether it's the genocide in the Middle East, or, let's say, mass murder on the other side of the planet, increases political awareness greatly, so there's an immediacy to the experience, but there's also a feeling of complete helplessness. And I do think that's different in that if you heard about the nuclear race in the 40s and 50s, you read about it, but it's not something you could sort of livestream into your living room all the time.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  That is something you can do now, particularly if you spend a lot of time on social media, and that probably increases the feeling of helplessness.

• 30:28Ezra Klein?

  One of the other things I think is interesting about social media is that it does create an answer to the question it poses. You have seen something terrible in front of you. And what you can do is post or comment or like. And I do think it creates this somewhat confusion between action and effect. It's an action that may not have an effect, but it does sort of complete an instant stress cycle. You've just seen something terrible. We have to do something. Well, in the place you're in, what you do is post. And again, one reason that I focus here is that I think this is truer for political elites than for anything else.

• 31:13Ezra Klein?

  And I think one of the unusual things about this whole story we're in is that the elites are more addled than anyone else's. So you go back to Walter Lippman's book, Public Opinion, which I think comes out in 1922, if I'm not wrong, right around there. And Walter Lippman's answer to the reality that the world outside our heads differs from the world inside our heads, that our pictures of reality are always flawed. So how do we engage with this world that we don't really understand? Is this famously quite unsatisfying? Well, there should be these technocratic elite panels and they know everything. And one of the ways that that ends up being an obviously wrong answer is it assumed the elites would not be addled.

• 31:56Ezra Klein?

  But in fact, nobody is more brain addled right now by social media than Donald Trump or Elon Musk, you know, than the top people in the White House, that there is such a, that nobody is more attentionally hooked on this kind of information than the people who've made politics their life's work. And that just creates, I think, a strange thing because, you know, normal people will then sort of turn to people who are engaged in politics all the time for cues on what to do and how to feel and where to join. And not always, but often they're the worst people to ask or to follow because they're

• 32:36Ezra Klein?

  the most crazed by these, you know, by this form of political attention.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is a book that's mainly written from below in some sense. I mean, it's not just for the left, but it's written from the left. And that means it describes the effects of like the declining cost of political expression through the online. So as you say, you're faced with an obvious wrong or a moral scandal. And before you maybe had to write a newspaper editor, you had to, let's say, contact your local party chief, or you had to go and stand in the middle of a square and start shouting. Now you can do something else. You can express yourself politically much more cheaply and easily than before. But then there's a question of diminishing returns as well. Like, it's easy, but what are the actual effects?

• 33:28Speaker 04

  Now, that is a question of how the decline in cost of political expression affects popular capacity for social change. When you look at it from the top of society, we can see, as you say, that there's also variant of hyperpolitics there. I think the modus of government of the second Trump administration, its short-termism, its incapacity to plan, its unwillingness to plan, also indicates that deinstitutionalization or incoherence between different factions of the elite has also had severe consequences, let's say, for the people who are actually in charge. I mean, there's a really spectacular example of this, of Elon Musk being interviewed by the editor of The Economist recently. And, I mean, it gets very brutal.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  But do you see why this makes people think that this man, who has all this power, he's the world's richest man, he thinks he has a right to influence our politics? It makes people, it's why, you know, we started this conversation saying superlatives. It's why people loathe you. I mean, some people do loathe you.

• 34:29Speaker 06

  Yes, some people do.

• 34:30Speaker 05

  But do you understand why? Do you think what you're doing is helpful for Western democracy?

• 34:35Speaker 06

  Maybe some people do loathe me. And that's probably true. I don't care. The, but the fact that, as you pointed out, a quarter billion people follow me is that I think a lot more people actually like me than don't. And I think a lot more people hate you and the media more than you realize.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  And he openly insults her also afterwards on his own private platform. But the striking thing about the interview is that these are two members of the same class. They're shouting at each other in the middle of the public sphere. Normally, in a different situation, you'd expect some class solidarity from both sides. And if we're in this together, we have to think about a common project. And the elite is severely divided, particularly in the US, but also in Europe. And they don't actually have institutions to reconcile their social, sectoral, geographic interests. And what the online world does is that it, I think, aggravates the dispolarization to such an extent that they cannot think long term about what their interests are.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  So hyperpolitics, I think, has compounding and very severe consequences for the elite as well. It's just that the book doesn't provide a full theoretical model of how you should probe these effects.

• 35:51Ezra Klein?

  I want to come back to that in a second. As you did write a very interesting piece in the New Left Review that is more in this direction and thinking about Donald Trump. But quickly, because as you say, the book is written from within the left, something you said there pinged for me, which is that you would expect a kind of class solidarity between Elon Musk and the editor of The Economist. Can I ask why you would expect that? Because when I look back on past interviews, you have huge divisions between, you know, the elites of different countries at all times. I mean, Musk is a highly right-wing American elite who has highly politicized himself. He's not just a, you know, random CEO at this point. The press is often very antagonistic. You know, I think about, say, like the Buckley, the Dahl debates where they're threatening

• 36:35Ezra Klein?

  to punch each other in the face, you know, on live television.

• 36:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, stop calling your crypto net face. Let's stop calling names. Or smack you in your goddamn face. You stay plastered. Gentlemen, let's.

• 36:47Ezra Klein?

  Tell me about your intuition that there is an absence now of elite class solidarity when in the past that existed. Because I know my read of history, you think about McCarthyism, right? Where they're getting each other like destroyed from public life, you know, on the assumption being a communist, whether or not it's true, that elite politics has often been very rivalrous and that assumptions of solidarity have never held at any, for any great number of them.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  So I have to confess that this is a manifestation of a vulgar Marxism that's probably lurking in me, where I see two creatures that should have the same class instinct and should be naturally sympathetic to each other. But as you say, actually, elite division or elite rivalry is the rule rather than the exception across history, particularly in the US, because the country is so large, you have all kinds of economic sectors. It's very difficult to unite each faction of the elite into one organization. The only periods in American history, and I'd say also in European history and more broadly, on a global scale, that you do have elite unity and solidarity is when there's

• 38:02Speaker 04

  a working class threat on the other side. So when it comes to anti-communism or quelching the labor movement under Reagan, that is really the last time you had a concerted employer offensive. But once that opponent is severely weakened and fractures, you immediately have elite factionalism showing up. So yes, you're right. They should not like each other, or they're not destined to like each other. Still, I think it's striking because it is violence within a specific class and it should not be confused for the type of radical polarization that we've often been taught to think about in the last 10 years, where somehow society is highly polarized. I think a lot of recent politics can be more explained through elite polarization rather than social polarization as a whole. But that's still, I mean, a different discussion.

• 38:47Ezra Klein?

  Oh, this, I wrote a book on polarization a couple of years back. And this is actually the argument of the book, that the elites are polarizing. And then they're giving the public much more polarized choices, which is polarizing the public in turn, and it creates a kind of flywheel. And I think that's very true. I want to go back to this piece you did in the New Left Review, where, which is more focused on Trump and Trump's second term. And you quote the political scientist Ivan Krasdev, who writes that the essence of the Trumpian revolution is the implosion of time itself. Tell me a bit about that idea.

• 39:22Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, it's a fascinating piece, which he wrote for the Financial Times. It's a bit speculative. So it's trying to make a couple of observations about Trump's mode of rule, which, I mean, anyone who's turned on the television or logged on to their social media platforms has probably gotten a taste of in the last two years. And it is obviously, I think, very different from previous American presidents. But there's one thing that really stands out, and that is it's short-termism or the fact that there's no thinking beyond the 24-hour news cycle. In fact, a lot of political decisions seem to be informed by the presumed effects those decisions will have on a media cycle and on its perceived popularity. That doesn't mean there isn't a court around Trump that feeds ideas into the machine.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  So obviously, there are different ideological factions, whether it's Rubio, whether it's Kobi, that have certain plans on how to reestablish American hegemony in the new century. But it seems that what Trump does is that he takes these suggestions and then he evaluates them on their efficacy in terms of media effects. Will this keep me in the news for the next 24 hours if I bomb this country or if I do this? And then afterwards, for the next 48 hours, will come up with a different plan. And I thought it's a very...

• 40:40Speaker 04

  Illuminating observation because it depersonalizes Trump to some extent as the symptom of wider malaise that can also be institutionally explained. It's because everyone's so personally dependent on his caprices and because the GOP, despite some theories, is not a mass party. It's still, let's say, a small camarilla or a small clique that is very strongly attached to the state. That probably also explains why the administration could not think a week in ahead or two weeks in ahead. I mean, it's a striking contrast with a Chinese Communist Party that is still formulating five-year plans or five-year designs and a Trump admin that I think can revise a

• 41:24Speaker 04

  decision during, I mean, one day.

• 41:27Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, you have this line in there that what if short-termism is structural now? And I've been thinking about that line because I do think there is this constant question around Trump and Trumpism of whether or not with him, you're looking at a very idiosyncratic psychology that is highly tuned to the particular moment. I've often described him as a human engagement algorithm. And he really reflects to me the way Twitter thinks and the way X or True Social, whatever it is, feel.

• 42:03Ezra Klein?

  The people around him don't necessarily, you know? I've got a lot of critiques to make of a J.D. Vance, a Marco Rubio, a Stephen Miller. They're not actually short-term thinkers, all of them. Consider things on a longer timeframe, think in a more, to other political elites, recognizably ideological way. Joe Biden was, towards the end of his administration, one of the things that his defenders were saying was that his plans were measured in decades, but unfortunately, elections happen in, you know, mere years. And so there's a question of whether what Trump is, is a kind of harbinger of what is coming or what is really going on, the short-termism, you know, for reasons of both

• 42:48Ezra Klein?

  de-institutionalization and maybe online algorithms and other things, is coming and he's like a tuning fork for the future or not. But I do look at a place like the UK and they're like running through prime ministers at incredible clip. Like, there is a kind of volatility out there that is not affecting China in the same way. And so, yeah, I guess I'd like to hear you talk more about to what degree you think this short-termism is structural, to what degree you think the Trumpism that you're describing there is distinctive to a kind of person? Is it simply an adjustment period in a kind of a new formation of technology? How do you see that?

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's a loaded metaphor, but I think some Darwinian reading in that you have the species and they have the environment. And the environment has obviously changed, so that is the structural story we're telling. But there does seem to be one species or one particular example of that species that really flourishes in this new environment, and that's Trump. And I do think there is a personal dimension to it. I mean, he himself went through the transition of different media regimes. He was the man of television, the kind of showman of reality TV in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. And then he, I think, handily transitioned or moved into the era of the algorithm and social media. But it's very clear that in the case of Rubio and Vance, the ideology is actually a burden.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  And it's precisely because Trump is unburdened by any ideological convictions. This doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't believe anything. It's more that ideology as a kind of cognitive frame that filters your decisions is not something that he's very familiar with. He has other concerns that come first. And that probably also allows him to be such a showman, and that's why he was able to win those two elections. And I think someone like Vance, who you can sense is opportunistic, but is more invested in the idea of ideology, wants to write books in which he talks about his conversions and expose, or sorry, expounds his worldview. I'm not sure that his pitch to the contemporary media-addled, volatile voter will be as convincing as that of the showman himself.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  And it's very clear that some politicians also in Europe have tried to ape that Trumpian style. It's, it's hard. I mean, there is a, there's a certain skill or even artisanal quality to how he does it, which once again is a question of structure and agency at the same time.

• 45:13Ezra Klein?

  Trump himself is an unusual case, but MAGA, MAGA as a kind of broader movement that for many of its people you can really live in, it really does have ideas. Increasingly, it has institutions that are associated with it and leaders who are associated with it. You can live in its world. It can give you a sort of meaning. It has rallies. It has, in some ways, it seems very much more like past eras of politics do than anything we've seen more recently. So from your perspective, is MAGA hyper-politics? Is it the coming of something new? How do you see what is happening there on the American right?

• 45:55Speaker 04

  I think it's an interesting and complicated question because the first Trump term and the second Trump term are obviously very different. And I do think the second Trump term is much more institutionalized. I mean, for the first election victory, he himself and his entourage were surprised that even one, that wasn't the case. Second time around, the Heritage Foundation, Project 25, that indicates that they were better prepared and that there was a project of institutionalization, which they consciously pursued. The question whether MAGA is a mass movement and whether they've managed to reinvent, I'd say even certain forms of 20th century far-right mass politics, which I think is also related to the so-called F-question debate, whether Trump is a fascist or not.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  I think, yes, the second Trump term is different from the first. There has been a weaponization, for example, of parts of the security state, it's ICE. There has been an attempt to create a solid base of supporters that will remain with them also through the fact that there's now all kinds of state funding involved. And of course, these kind of paramilitary organizations do resemble the 20th century squads that we usually associate with fascist politics. At the same time, the question always remains whether there will be a Trumpism without Trump. There's maybe a question whether Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene and some of the first Trumpers now see themselves as carrying that movement forwards, also

• 47:25Speaker 04

  by dissenting from certain types of GOP orthodoxy. I'm just less convinced that they have the institutional structure, except for a couple of podcasts and media channels to keep that going. So that is obviously an open question. We'll see what happens. But the GOP has not transformed itself into a mass membership party. The buy-in of a lot of the agents of ICE does seem to be heavily reliant, not on their ideological agreement, but more on their financial opportunities they have in joining the security state. And when they lose the midterms and we'll see obviously what happens with the next election, I'm just not sure that it will persist for such a long time. There could, of course, be another mass movement that goes further and radicalizes it.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  But I don't think that's the same as a party throughout the 20th century that could bide its time across cycles of five to 10 to even 20 years and then strike when MAGA, I think, is so beholden to these contemporary media cycles that are very short and very volatile that it could, yeah, as easily rise as it could fall.

• 48:40Ezra Klein?

  One thing that we've been talking about here is the way institutions, but we've, I think, primarily been talking about civic institutions have eroded. I think there's another question, which is about the way that the institutions of governance and power have ossified. And this maybe goes back to what you were saying earlier about the ways in which a system might have become more resistant, not in this case to me just to individual power, but almost to any form of power, which is to say that in America, where, you know, we have a much more closely divided politics, where it's less, you're less likely to get

• 49:20Ezra Klein?

  bipartisan compromise, you get more filibusters, your ability to pass big bills has gone down over time. And that is true even when power is arranged behind the bills. Like, I remember for Barack Obama, you had the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, both supporting an infrastructure bill. It went nowhere. There was a lot of power behind immigration bills in that era. They went nowhere, right? Because you could kill so much more in Congress. There are so many more ways to wrap things up, so much more you can do in the courts. In Europe, it's a situation I know less well, but certainly there is a broad sense that the European Union has created more slowness, more powers that are acting upon you from far away.

• 50:03Ezra Klein?

  And I wonder if some of the movement of political energy to spaces of discourse, of posting, of things that, on the one hand, are low effort, but at least some kind of answer comes back to you quickly. I wonder if it reflects to some degree a disillusionment with what you can get done in institutions that are now very hard to get anything done in, just, you know, they've been around a long time, they're balancing out a lot of different interests, people know how to work them better.

• 50:41Ezra Klein?

  Money can talk very loudly, but I actually always think it doesn't talk as loudly as people think it does because I've watched a lot of money fail to get its way in American politics and elsewhere, that it's just so much easier to block anything than to achieve anything that almost people don't believe in achievements.

• 51:03Speaker 04

  I think, I mean, George Soros is, of course, a spectacular example of someone who's been spraying millions at certain causes. And if you look at where the world is headed politically, it's not very clear that he has the total control, which some conspiracy thinkers attribute to him. I think, yes, it is absolutely true that even on the level of the elite, so there's been a complete legalization of, let's say, outside election spending also in the US. It's also become easier in Europe, but it's not very clear that this increasing lobbying power actually also makes it easier to achieve your policy aims. And that, I mean, that is a paradox, right? Because you could say, okay, social change has become impossible from below. But if you say also from above, it's become very difficult to pursue. There's a much more profound puzzle to be examined there.

• 51:48Speaker 04

  I think there is, there is a question about the story of deinstitutionalization as affecting society, but also affecting the state. Because what the adjustments in the 80s and 90s, a story that's often told as neoliberalism, but which I think goes much deeper, is that it, on the one hand, entails a concerted attack on certain institutions, which are seen as hampering economic recovery, particularly unions, which are blamed for inflation, and thereby you have to get rid of them to basically restore economic normality. But on the level of the state, there's also a concerted displacement towards unelected, non-electoral bodies, also to keep them shielded from certain elite pressure groups.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  To say a central bank has the government in the interest of everyone, and thereby they shouldn't be meddled with. But what's interesting is that that does two things. It moves power to institutions that are not open to pressure, whether it's elite or popular pressure. Obviously, it's still easier for the elite to get access, but not as easy as as many people think it is. And at the same time, it increases the attractiveness of the veto option you're describing. So if we cannot get certain things through these institutions, what we have to do is just build a kill switch or create something that at least makes it possible to stop something if we don't want it going through. And that also, I think, becomes attractive

• 53:16Speaker 04

  from the lower half of society. I do think that just eliminating these veto capacities is not going to solve the problem either, because the problem is much more structural insofar as the attractiveness of the veto is a function of an institutional issue that's older. And if you want to make the contrast with China, Chinese state capacity means very little without the Chinese Communist Party. And that's not just a state, that's an institution that plays, I mean, a very strange role in uniting classes, but also different factions of the elite. I don't see an American equivalent of the CCP, let alone a European equivalent, that could play that role.

• 53:55Ezra Klein?

  I think China is such an interesting counterexample here. I don't ever pretend to know the structure of Chinese public opinion. But across a number of measures that people do look at, and I do think we, you know, feel like we have some confidence, and there is more optimism and sense of agency around things like AI in China than in America, less pessimism. And, you know, China's a place where, as an individual, you really don't have, say, a governance. You really, there's very little you can do to affect what the top levels of the CCP are going to do. On the other hand, somebody is doing something constantly, and change is happening and movement is happening.

• 54:36Ezra Klein?

  And even if you are not the one acting upon the world, the world is there to be acted upon. I am not, I would not want to live under that system. I am not lauding it in that respect. But I do think it sits now as a kind of counterexample to a lot of Western systems, where it almost has created this choice of, do you want rights and inaction? Or few rights and action? Trump is interesting from this perspective to me, because he comes into office and is able to make a very big show of cracking the system,

• 55:17Ezra Klein?

  it appears, in half, and doing things which people thought couldn't be done. He signs all these executive orders, including one ending birthright citizenship, and throws them out into the crowd. And it looks like a WWE rally mixed with a governance function. But it turns out he has not cracked the code. He is passing less legislation than other presidents. Many of his things end up turned back in courts. Doge moves with incredible force and speed for a little while and then collapses entirely. He seems overwhelmed by events. He's in an Iran war he clearly has no control over. And so, you know, Trump had maybe an attentional answer. He was able to create the spectacle of things happening. But then you're a member of the public,

• 56:02Ezra Klein?

  and well, what has really happened that is different now for you? Or your price is lower? Does America seem like it is doing better? Is anybody really in control? And the answer again is no. And now Donald Trump is like falling asleep at meetings, and they're going to lose the midterms. And so that sense of nobody is, I am not in control, but nor is anybody else persists. And I think you have this dilemma right now of a West that seems in a kind of political drift, often a dangerous one. But it is not like the illiberal forces in the West have mastered the system either. China is moving very fast, and I think it exerts a kind of pressure on the West to move faster. But it's not really clear how to respond to it. And I just wonder about the politics

• 56:47Ezra Klein?

  that creates on both sides, the politics of action there, but without much individual agency, the politics of individual agency here, but without much ultimate promise of action.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  Yes, I mean, I'd be careful to say there's no such thing as input legitimacy in China either. So there is obviously not the electoral system that exists in the West. But it's very clear that, for example, protests around COVID did have an effect on how, let's say, the Chinese leadership refigured its policies. And there is a kind of distinction one could make between input and output legitimacy, where parts of the West have seen an increase in input legitimacy. There's increasing turnout in elections. But when it comes to output legitimacy, which a Chinese state is so spectacularly good at, it's not very clear that that's happening. To me, the question is whether the discussion about state capacity

• 57:46Speaker 04

  or the discussion about getting some of these policy packages through can be linked, not just to a discussion about what the state can do, but rather what institutions are necessary for it. Because, as you say, deinstitutionalization also makes it harder for elites to plan. And Europe is, I mean, a striking instance of this, where in the face of, let's say, Chinese competition, but also like the Trumpian onslaught of tariffs, the geopolitical rivalry they're currently embroiled in, European elites are simply not coming up with an answer at all. I mean, there are a couple of plans that are floating around, but it's not as if there's an articulated plan. And for that, you need some kind of institutional infrastructure to basically unite these different factions

• 58:30Speaker 04

  and make it sure that Europe relaunches itself in 2020s. But it's strange, because you're put into a position, particularly as someone like me coming from the left, where you kind of have to help elites save themselves, or say, like, please get your act together and find some kind of organ that can coordinate between all the different factions of you.

• 58:51Speaker 04

  And, I mean, pointing out elite failure in itself is not a policy, but that's mostly what, let's say, commentary on European politics has become in the last 10 years.

• 58:59Ezra Klein?

  One of the ways you're telling this story is you have mass politics, and that goes to the sort of more post-politics, like the calmer political period of the 90s. You know, your Bill Clintons, your Tony Blairs, not everything is political. We're at the end of history. Everybody can calm down now. Communism has fallen. That thing gives way to the period after the financial crisis, you know, anti-politics, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, political movements are rising, but that fundamentally hate the idea of political institutions that are not trying to, in ways that are traditionally recognizable, to take them over, even build power in the way we normally think about it. And then you get hyper politics. And one way of thinking about hyper politics as a period.

• 59:46Ezra Klein?

  Is that it's actually just fundamentally destructive, but necessarily so, that that institutional story we're telling now is one in which culture, institutions, bureaucracies had ossified. And is Donald Trump a good answer? No, he's not a good answer. But he demonstrated that somebody with more planning could do something like Doge and maybe do it in a way that is constructive. That many things that had become ideologically rigid, from how we think about trade to immigration to China to much more, is now opened up. You see a kind of rise on the left in American politics with the DSA and Mam Doni and others in that cohort.

• 1:00:28Ezra Klein?

  And there is a dynamism to it. And I think the question is whether or not this kind of just ends up in destruction and nihilism, because nothing can gain power for long enough to build something that is new and enduring. Or it's actually, in a Darwinian sense, to go back to the metaphor you used earlier, this is a kind of necessary byproduct of revitalization, right? You know, for Canada, for Europe, for others, that what was there is breaking down. And it is, we're in a messy interennium. Everybody loves quoting the misquotations of Gramsci here, you know, a time of monsters. Do you come down on one side or another of this?

• 1:01:10Ezra Klein?

  That we're going through a cleansing fire versus we're just going through a fire?

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, the problem with the time of monsters quote is that it's describing a pre-revolutionary situation. That was the age which Gramsci himself was living through in Italy. I don't think we're in that. I don't think we're in a pre-pre-revolutionary state. I do think we need to be honest about this, particularly from the left. I do think there is something to be said about the revitalization story you're indicating in that Trump at least has the refreshing effect of clarifying or forcing choice. He's ended some notion of the Tina dogma, or the there is no alternative dogma, namely that you choose between Pepsi and Coca-Cola at the election booth. And in the end, it's basically the same product with a couple of tweaks.

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  I think he has finished off that perception or that world of politics. At the same time, you can very clearly see that the increase in election turnout in the US is also a function of the fact that voters see choice. And if you want to shoot Donald Trump before an election, that means you very clearly see choice, because you want to eliminate one side of the choice matrix that's presented to you. In Germany now, there's an election in Saxony where they're guessing that there's been a doubling of voter turnout from 2006. Let's say from 44% to 77%. I don't think that's a crisis of democracy. I think there's an economic crisis in Europe, but democracy is doing better.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  And there's a beautiful phrase about political literacy, namely the sense that people have that the factors in their social lives, whether it's their rent, the state of their roads, the price of the product, are partially subject to political decisions. Politics has an effect in my life. It matters and it can change things. Hyperpolitics has entailed an increase in political literacy to some extent. Now, of course, there's a lot of nonsense and, let's say, crazy theorizing going on online. Hyperpolitics is quite exhausting and it induces a nostalgia for the 90s and 2000s, which I cover in the book as well, because people simply don't want to talk about woke with their uncle at a family gathering, for example.

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  But at the same time, I want to make this very clear. This book is not rejecting or dismissing hyperpoliticization as somehow reversible or even negative. I think it is good that people care about politics. I think we should celebrate the end of post-politics. The question is more, where is hyperpolitics going? And can there be such a thing as an institutional formula which extends hyperpolitics beyond mere outrage?

• 1:03:48Ezra Klein?

  I think that is a good place to end. So also final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  There are three books I chose, which are a bit miscellaneous in that they belong to different genres. The first is The Prophet by Isaac Deutscher, a Polish historian who only learned English, I think, in his early 30s, and then wrote one of the greatest biographies of the 20th century. It's a three-part biography of Leon Trotsky, the famous Russian revolutionary. It's obviously beloved by Trotskyists, so it has a sectarian appeal. There's a lot of neoconservatives that were brought up on its diet. Even Tony Blair is said to have read it. But I read it when I was in my early 20s and I've recently revisited it, also in the form of an audiobook, and it is completely enchanting.

• 1:04:37Speaker 04

  It is an absolute masterpiece, not just a biography, but also a political history. It also captures a moment in time that feels enormously distant, but still very relevant. And it is a pleasure to listen to and read in stylistic terms. So even if you are an instinctual or aggressive anti-communist, I don't think you will not like this book. The second book is Cheese by Willem Elschot, written in the 1930s. This is something much more obscure. It's by a Flemish or Belgian author. And the story of the book is relatively simple.

• 1:05:18Speaker 04

  It's about a middle-aged man with a family who wants to become rich as a merchant and starts selling a product he hates and never eats, namely cheese, and fails at doing so. And that's the whole plot. And I think it is a beautiful parable, particularly in the 21st century, for a society in which buying and selling things has become this compulsive, almost obligatory habit. But we seem to be relatively indifferent to the products we actually are buying and selling. The final one, and I'm not sure there is already an English translation of this, is Some Months From My Life by the French writer Michel Welbeck. So a novelist who also plays a very prominent role in the book Hyperpolitics.

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

  He appears as a protagonist in several chapters. It is not a novel, but more of a personal memoir of his, in which he relates a couple of rather chaotic months in his personal life, in which he was asked to star in an erotic movie.

• 1:06:19Ezra Klein?

  Who among us?

• 1:06:20Speaker 04

  And then, yes, these things happen. And after which he meditates on contemporary questions of sexuality, cultural wars, politics. But, I mean, this might be strange, but it's a profoundly moving book.

• 1:06:36Ezra Klein?

  You really take him as a bit of a prophet, to use the first book's title in there. I've always meant to read some of his books and I haven't. So given that maybe the translation of this isn't out yet, if somebody wanted to start with his fiction, and you sort of see him as this like prophet figure, somebody who understands the future before it comes, even though his politics are very, very different than yours, what would be like the starting book of his fiction you would recommend?

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  So his debut, which I think is translated into English as Extension of the Domain of Struggle, that is the best place to start. If you go for later works, I would recommend Serotonin, which also gave him a Nostradamus-like quality in France, because he seemed to predict part of the yellow vest and farmers' protests that shook the country. But once again, it's not just about his apperceptions of the contemporary world, but also about, yes, I think he's a novelist for a world that has become less novelistic, in some cases even resistant to novelization.

• 1:07:43Speaker 04

  And I'm always impressed on how he's still able to give us a rendition of a world that somehow doesn't seem to produce very novel-like characters.

• 1:07:57Ezra Klein?

  Anton Jaeger, thank you very much.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.