Hyperpolitics in America

Anton Jäger, New Left Review:

The ‘long decade’ of protest can then be recast less as a successful assault on the Washington citadel from below but rather as a mutation in the methods of managing elite-mass relations. The solution to the 2008 crisis of massively over-leveraged financial institutions—pumping the stock exchange and asset prices—further widened the gap between top and base across American politics, as between capital fractions. Yet it has not tilted the social gradient, and popular oversight over the apparatus of government remains weak.

This presents the chequered board on which the new political surge has been played out. The world hegemon’s public sphere has been reoccupied, yet the burst of re-politicization has not increased popular control over government nor put important areas of policymaking within grasp. The spectacular mismatch between output and input, which American political scientists had long diagnosed—public support for a proposal (for instance, Medicare) being negatively correlated with its chance of being implemented as a policy—has only deepened, as the Biden–Harris record shows.