The right today … is just as inconsequential as the left, and for exactly the same reason, that it’s hyper but not formally organised. “The people who go on marches subscribe to the same podcast, might follow the same pages on Instagram, might be on the same Telegram channels, but they don’t have an organisational history they shared before they entered the march. This is different even to the BNP, where marchers had a shared history in football hooliganism, and the National Front. That shared subculture is no longer there.
He says this is clear with Reform UK, “which is so heavily leader-dependent. The entire movement is at risk with this scandal of the crypto-billionaire, because there’s no party infrastructure. There is just Nigel and a smartphone and then a couple of private donors.”
To me, this fails to take into account that the right is different to the left: they have more money. “Maybe I understated the availability of private funding,” he says mildly. “The fact that we can even talk of a trillionaire, such as Elon Musk, means there’s a complete secession of that individual from what we could even call society. That is a variable in explaining why hyperpolitics on the right thrives and why hyperpolitics on the left has found it much more difficult to achieve tangible results.” They are not more organised or more ideologically coherent or more strategic; they are just better funded – which puts quite a lot on the shoulders of capital itself as the overarching organising principle of global politics. Money might not be the only thing talking, but it’s the only thing getting what it wants.
Jäger explains why we are living in the age of hyperpolitics
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