Hyperpolitics in command

Anton Jäger, New Left Review:

Trump the hyperpolitician is a consequence of this elite disarticulation, providing agency absent a stabilizing structural frame.

What Trump catalyses, of course, is more incoherence, as the contemporary condition of Europe shows. Here, a set of pre-existing geopolitical and economic dependencies makes elite fracture and cross-class bloc failure far more disabling than in the us. Mainstream parties still hold power in Europe’s three largest countries, but their situation is precarious and—a sign of the hyperpolitical mood of the electorates—their leaders are deeply disliked. In Germany, Merz leads a directionless, ill-tempered coalition which collectively won only 45 per cent of the vote; his personal rating is on –64. Though Germany is the de facto leader of the eu bloc, its ruling elites cannot muster enough cohesion and popular backing to relaunch their own export industries against Chinese competition and American energy pressure, let alone craft a continental strategy.

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This lack of vertical backing for European rulers is in part explained by their inability to unite capitalist fractions behind a coherent strategy to recharge their stagnant economies, trapped between the diktats of the bond markets, a faltering Energiewende, regulatory burdens of the eu’s ‘compliance capitalism’, the growing weight of social care for the elderly, failing public infrastructure, unbeatably cheap Chinese manufacturing and the crippling, self-inflicted gas-price shock resulting from their culpable failure to structure and support a diplomatic answer to the Ukraine–Russia question. Instead of directly grappling with these problems, Europe’s governing classes are issuing a call to arms against Russia and greedily tallying the martial stock of poor war-torn Ukraine for the inventory of a future eu army.

In their switch to intense Ukrainophilia—having long disdained the country as a troublesome peripheral mendicant in need of harsh neo-imperial financial discipline: viz., the 2013 eu–Ukraine association agreement—otherwise bureaucratic figures like Merz and Starmer launch into the mode of hyperpolitics, their energy and enthusiasm delinked from material and political reality. Despite patent lack of popular support, their eagerness for military spending swings from aircraft carriers and fighter jets to the best possible intercontinental ballistic missiles, like an oligarch’s mistress comparing handbags or earrings.

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Instead of negotiating a lasting peace with Russia that would respect Ukraine’s self‑determination, the eu debate revolves—behind closed doors—around what credit system its member states should use to arm against their great continental neighbour. Accompanying this are sly attempts by each to stay in the Pentagon’s good books with logistics and supply for the Trump–Netanyahu war of aggression against Iran, while posturing about a rules-based international order.