None of those parameters are applicable today. Rather, the contemporary situation presents a recalcitrant hybrid, difficult to relate to historical exempla. On the one hand, popular involvement in American politics has seen a relative resurgence compared to the disengagement of the 1990s and early 2000s. At the same time, institutionalized involvement is at all-time lows, while American parties have only further cartelized and fused with the media or donor classes.
How best to describe the result? Some formalization is possible here: a politicization axis, on one hand, measuring degrees of mobilization, and a social axis, measuring degrees of civic affiliation and membership, on the other. Plotted on these, the first line—an aggregate of turnout, protest activity, political assassination—shows a marked uptick in the wake of the 2008 credit crunch. At the same time, this upward sloping curve is crossed by a downward-sloping line: a continuous decline of indices tracking civic engagement. Throughout the recent ‘decade of protest’, the secular decline in American membership organizations only accelerated; unions, clubs, associations, political parties and now—spectacularly for American life—churches continued to lose members, exacerbated by the rise of a new digital media circuit and tightening labour laws, and compounded by the ‘loneliness epidemic’ that metastasized out of the actual one of 2020.
The result is a curiously K-shaped recovery: while the erosion of American civic life proceeds apace, the country’s public sphere is increasingly subject to convulsive instances of agitation and controversy, from storming of government buildings to online conspiracy theories. General discontent runs high, fuelling political emotions; anger at police racism or Zionist violence—at immigrant crime or Chinese weather balloons—boils over.
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.