Pathologies of American political culture, where—as Engels once put it—two great gangs of political speculators battle for power. Echoing social media’s strange mix of activism and atomization, a fervid hyper-politicization has replaced the quiescence of the Clinton–Bush years, Jäger argues, but the determination of US policies remains beyond popular reach.

The comparison lacks obvious bite on many fronts. Most of all, it suppresses one of the key elements of any far-right threat throughout the twentieth century: the presence of a left on the verge of a revolutionary breakthrough. Even in the most conventional analyses offered in the Third Period, fascism had to be understood on a dual timeline: an inability of bourgeois classes to stabilize their rule after the Great War, and an increasingly militant proletariat vying for state power. Caught in this limbo, ruling elites invited the parties of frustrated veterans to step in to solve the deadlock by smashing the anti-capitalist threat; fascism expressed both the resolution and repression of the revolutionary intermezzo. None of these features apply to the contemporary American case. What does the fascist heuristic accomplish, then? Its main consequence is to rally the disaffected left behind their lesser-evil capitalist masters—as if Biden’s crimes paled to nothing beside the not-dissimilar ones of Trump.

Here the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’—a form of politicization without clear political consequences—may prove useful. Post-politics was finished off by the 2010s; the public sphere has been repoliticized and re-enchanted, but on terms which are more individualistic and short-termist, evoking the fluidity and ephemerality of the online world. This is an abidingly ‘low’ form of politics—low-cost, low-entry, low-duration, and all too often, low-value. It is distinct both from the post-politics of the Clintonite 1990s, in which public and private were radically separate, and the traditional mass politics of the twentieth century, always low in the us. What Americans are left with is a grin without a cat: a politics with only weak policy influence or institutional ties.

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The result is a preponderance of social-media ‘wars of movement’ over institution-building ‘wars of position’, with the primary forms of political engagement as fleeting as market transactions. This is more a matter of necessity than of choice: the legislative environment for durable movement-building remains hostile, and American activists must contend with a vitiated social landscape and an unprecedentedly expansive Kulturindustrie.

A morphology of American political culture anno 2024 then appears in contrast: neither the mass politics of the 1890s–1960s, nor the post-politics of the long 1990s. Behind the current conjuncture lurk strategic questions which American left-wing thinkers were keener to tackle in the 2010s, when the question of surrogate parties, dirty breaks, or left-wing caucuses maintained a constant relevance. Today, very few of these still stand on the mental radar of the left-circuit. As Tim Barker has noted, leading figures of the American left have maintained a highly Oedipal relationship to the Democrats. On the one hand, it is the party somehow uniquely responsible for a resolution to Israel’s punishment campaign, while on the other, it has long served as hallowed institutions of elite Zionism and the Cold War security state.footnote16 Ironically, the result of the extra-party assault of the 2010s has been to tighten the hold of the dnc as the horizon of the American left. Heightened political emotions can also be captured by party cartels.footnote17 After a decade of experimentation with semi-independent party activity, a Squad that still sees itself as an anxious battalion for a better Democratic Party is the main remnant of America’s left-populist wave.

The American rendition of hyperpolitics is not necessarily dysfunctional for the country’s ruling order. What it presages for the next four years is mostly more of the same: extra-parliamentary challenges, legal contestation, high political emotion—and, just as under Biden,* promulgation of a bipartisan agenda that can pass a gridlocked Congress. Internationally, this means material support and legal cover for Israeli expansionism and proxy war on Iran, an aggressive stance towards China and proxy war with Russia, waged with a roughly bipartisan degree of ambivalence. *Domestically, it suggests an ongoing aggressive-permissive policy on the southern border, continued tensions around state-governed abortion policies and further tweaks to the tax code. Hysteresis à la Baudrillard may have a long way yet to run.