This story is published in partnership with the Daily Yonder.  It was sunny and warm for the end of November on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation in northern Montana. Joseph Eagleman was standing on a grassy hill, looking at a 20-panel solar array in the backyard of a Chippewa Cree elder. It was built under the Solar […]
Drafted in the 1940s during the country’s occupation by Allied forces, Japan’s constitution has long limited its defense capabilities.
She's recently been spotted with Tom Brady... Was this her M.O.?
The new year is no longer so new, and we’re 10 months away from the midterm elections. Let’s take stock of where things stand in this country by acknowledging five central points that combine to tell us that we are at an unprecedented and chilling place in our history: We have a corrupt and incompetent president whom we are, for the time being, powerless to rein in; and on top of that, we have every reason to fear that, when the time comes to rein him in (this November), he will do everything he can to nullify the electoral process and reverse the voters’ will.Last year was a democratic nightmare. This year is going to be worse. But he can’t do this forever. My five points below describe his temporary strength. But they also suggest that his hold on absolute power is fragile, and the reckoning day is coming.Point one: On a personal level, Donald Trump is becoming more and more unhinged. He rambles, he stumbles, he fumbles. We don’t know whether he actually pooped himself in that one much-discussed episode in the Oval Office. But the fact that it has been discussed as something that might have happened is bad enough. And even if he retains full control of those evacuations, it’s the ones coming out of his brain and mouth that remain more concerning. Politico reported recently that the prime minister of Slovakia—a Trump ally—met with Trump at the White House on January 28 and later told other world leaders that he was concerned about Trump’s “psychological state.”That repost of the Obamas as apes has been widely interpreted as one more Trumpian effort to troll the libs. Sure, I guess it was that. But what if it was something else? It may also have been the act of a man who is losing some marbles. It was beyond anything even he has ever done along those lines. He’s losing it. The mainstream media is afraid to touch the topic. The right-wing media screams that everything’s fine, it’s Trump Derangement Syndrome. That’s an apt phrase, all right, but it means the opposite of what the Foxies think it means. The bottom line for now is that the rest of us, the majority that finds him repulsive, just has to sit here and watch. Point two: Politically, the bubble in which he lives is becoming further and further removed from reality. His penchant for self-aggrandization, always prodigious, has lately reached the point of insane self-parody. Case in point: Last Thursday, it was reported that there were 108,000 layoffs in January—the worst number since the Great Recession. But the stock market also hit 50,000 on Friday. Of course, any president would brag about the latter and play down the former, but Trump went much further, congratulating himself repeatedly on achieving this milestone in one year.First of all, “he” didn’t achieve it. And second, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was around 44,000 the day he took office, meaning it’s gone up around 6,000 points in the last year and change. That’s really no different from the change in the last year of Biden’s presidency, when it went from just under 38,000 up to 44,000. That’s normal stock market growth. People aren’t buying his economic palaver; they see it as self-serving and out of touch. But that isn’t even the worst part of the Trump bubble. He has come to believe that the American people actually want what Immigration and Customs Enforcement is doing where it’s been unleashed. They do not. He has created for himself a world in which he never hears a negative word about himself. This is not a plea for him and his people to wake up—they won’t, and I’m well past hoping they will. It is rather an observation that this too is one more Trumpian assault on democracy. He thinks himself answerable only to those who adore him and think he can do no wrong—in other words, to people who require of him no answers at all. The rest of the country—that is, the majority of the country—doesn’t exist.Point three: The corruption becomes more blatant and open by the week. That Wall Street Journal story about the UAE sheikh who bought a huge stake in Trump’s cryptocurrency venture and then got AI chip contracts was just insane. But we now live in an era when the president can do a Teapot Dome or worse on a weekly basis and there’s no one who can hold him to account.Well, check that: Someone can. As Andrew McCarthy noted in the National Review, House Oversight Chairman James Comer thundered ad nauseam about Joe Biden’s alleged corruption, even opening an impeachment inquiry, alleging that Trump’s predecessor had racked up $27 million in ill-gotten gains. Today? McCarthy: “Of course, Trump can’t be faulted for obstructing congressional investigations. There haven’t been any. Comer is busy tangling with the Clintons, the better to take the Epstein heat off a president whose poll numbers have declined as this year’s midterm elections beckon. Now that self-dealing has achieved heights so astronomical that $27 million would barely be a rounding error, Republicans have lost interest.”Point four: Speaking of Jeffrey Epstein, we know that that story is far from over, either in general or with respect to Trump. I won’t relate the rumors about Trump that surfaced recently as they’re not corroborated. But you’ve probably read them. I have no idea what the chances are that one fine morning this year, we are greeted by an explosive headline about Trump in this context that will blow our collective mind and change everything.Trump will deny any wrongdoing. The Republicans will rally behind him or be quiet. The right-wing media will defend him and say Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton. And while some Democrats will smell blood, too many others will say no, we can only talk about health care. Finally, point five: He is of course preparing to steal the midterms. Pundits and talking heads on cable news should dispense with even wondering whether he will. Of course he will try. And if he can’t pull it off, he and the GOP will challenge every result they possibly can in ways that you and I can’t even imagine.So here we are. Mentally deteriorating, unpopular, incompetent, corrupt, out of touch; and yet, in—for now—unshakably firm control of power, completely beyond any democratic accountability. And when that accountability moment comes in November, he will blatantly do whatever he can to erase and reverse it. So this year is going to be far worse than last, at least for a while. But he can’t shut out reality forever. No one can. And the longer he manages to do so, the more thunderous and unequivocal will be the comeuppance. The Trump bubble will burst, and it’ll be like the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments, crashing down on Pharoah’s head. Until then—patience. And rage.
Trump officials were thwarted last week when a judge blocked their plan to cancel the protected legal status of hundreds of thousands of Haitians in the United States. But for Haitian immigrants with this Temporary Protected Status, or TPS—granted when the U.S. government deems certain countries unsafe for citizens to return, offering these immigrants safe haven—the danger is far from over. Many Haitians around the country, regardless of legal status, have lived in fear since the late days of Trump’s campaign in 2024, when Trump’s harmful lies about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, led to an influx of Proud Boys and bomb threats. That fear has only intensified, particularly for those with temporary legal status and their family members, as communities around the country have suffered increasingly targeted and violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.Jacques, a Haitian immigrant with temporary status who asked me to use a pseudonym because he does not want to be targeted by the administration, rarely ever leaves the house; he asks friends to pick up groceries. While places like Minnesota have rightly garnered headlines, raids are being conducted everywhere, and everyone is on edge. Last year, the police department of a town near Jacques provided the FBI with the addresses of every known Haitian resident in Laurel, Delaware. In her decision to uphold Haitians’ TPS status last week, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of the District of Columbia noted that the 352,959 Haitians in the TPS program contribute billions in taxes to the nation. As Guerline Jozef, executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, has pointed out, they work key jobs as nurses, construction workers, caregivers, hotel workers, and manufacturers. These are, by and large, the jobs that Americans say outright they do not want to do. All of this is true, but Haitians—and other groups also targeted by this administration—contribute much more than that. I met Nixon Pierre-Louis outside his church one fall day a few months before the 2024 election. He was staying after the service to help other parishioners with their paperwork—taxes, immigration forms. “This is my way of contributing to society,” he said. The afternoon after the service is a rare block of free time for Pierre-Louis, who holds two jobs as a nurse and works nearly every day. When I spoke to him on a recent afternoon, he had finished his shift caring for a disabled adult and was heading to his second job at a retirement center—both jobs where he helps elderly and disabled people eat, dress, use the bathroom, and live their lives as fully as possible. He is almost unbearably kind, generous, and community-minded. You might think he’s the last person who should be looking over his shoulder right now. Yet Pierre-Louis, who has been a U.S. citizen for three decades, is nervous. “Why the animosity? Why don’t you want us here?” he asked. “We pay taxes, we follow the law, we follow the rules … we’re just making a living.” Yet every immigrant he knows is on edge; people have stopped showing up for church, skipping shifts at work. TPS holders live under a constant shadow of fear, but citizens don’t feel safe, either. “I am worried. I have an accent. I’m Black. They look at you by the color of your skin, the words you say and how you say them,” Pierre-Louis said. “I would never think in 2026 I would hear something like that.”The United States is Pierre-Louis’s home; this is where he is raising a family. Yet now, when he drives to church or work, he scans for federal agents. He carries his American passport everywhere. He reads stories about the African church elder in Portland, Maine, his window smashed open, the shards of glass flying toward the man’s 1-month-old baby and wife, both left stranded on the highway when the man was seized.Life got harder under the first Trump administration, but now it’s even worse. “I never thought of people being so cruel, being so heartless. It’s been hard, but not to this point,” Pierre-Louis said. “I am very worried for myself, for my wife, for my kids.” He has watched the surge in Minnesota carefully, and it’s only made him more worried. “U.S. citizens are killed because they tried to help other people,” he said. “If they can do it to white people in Minnesota, they can do it to anyone.”Reading the news is now like history class, said Jacques’s brother Jean, who has been a citizen for more than 20 years but asked for a pseudonym to protect his brother. “Instead of reading about it, now you’re living it.” Jean is afraid of being detained or deported too, despite being a U.S. citizen for more than 20 years. “It’s all how you look—‘You must be different.’ It’s ruthless, heartless, inhuman.”Pierre-Louis, Jean, and Jacques are not just puzzled about the racism and backlash against citizens. They want to know: If immigrants leave, who will do this work? “There are a lot of jobs Haitians and Latinos are doing, other people would not do,” Pierre-Louis said. There is a great need in industries like health care and poultry processing, and Haitians have been willing to work hard because “you’re contributing to the development of society, your community,” he said. “Chasing us out because you don’t like our accents, the color of our skin—that’s not practical.”The U.S. is facing a serious caregiver crisis. There are not enough health workers to care for everyone already, and it’s getting worse. By 2060, nearly a quarter of the U.S. population—some 94.7 million Americans—will be 65 or older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Caregiving is hard work, physically and emotionally, yet workers are underpaid, underappreciated, and mistreated. Immigrants account for about 28 percent of caregivers in the U.S., and the immigration raids are already having profound effects on caregiving.Other industries are no different. Jacques has worked in the poultry industry, where there have been frequent raids on processing plants. Employees run a whisper network, calling each other to warn: “You don’t want to get snatched by ICE.” Yet the meatpacking industry cannot function without immigrant workers, leading to instability and uncertainty in the nation’s food supply.Even if Haitians wanted to leave, it would be nearly impossible to get back home. “There are no commercial flights in and out of Haiti for months now because of violence,” Jean said. Haiti is still roiling from the 2010 earthquake and subsequent political unrest, with towns overtaken by violent gangs. “People are seeking refuge and fleeing for their lives,” Jean said. “To send them back, knowing what’s going to happen to them—they’re not going to survive, they’re going to get killed.” Anyone coming back from America would be thought to be carrying money and would be tortured to death, Pierre-Louis said.In 1990, the administration of George H.W. Bush created the TPS program for citizens from certain nations to work in the U.S. with protection from deportation. When it was not safe for the citizens of a designated nation to return—because of war or natural disasters, for example—they could continue working indefinitely in the U.S. TPS holders must show that they have never committed any felony or had more than two misdemeanors. Trump tried to end TPS in his first term (and then again last summer), but the program expanded significantly under Joe Biden, especially after the Covid pandemic left jagged gaps in the workforce. It’s hard to hear the constant narrative that people are invading the country, Pierre-Louis said, when “they were invited to come.”When the judge blocked the TPS cancellation, “you could feel the relief and the joy they felt,” Jean said of TPS holders. But their optimism is still cautious. The halt was “amazing,” Pierre-Louis said, but “I don’t know how long that’s going to last.” It’s hard to live in this kind of uncertainty, trapped between the adopted country that increasingly threatens violence and the country of origin that promises it. In the face of persecution, Pierre-Louis finds comfort in his faith—especially the Bible story where the people of God are enslaved, blamed for the nation’s ills, held in captivity by a cruel pharaoh and waiting for freedom. “We can’t stand before him and fight. But we know God can,” Pierre-Louis said. “This is our country,” he said, and “we’re not quitters.”
A photograph called Love (Hands in Hair) from the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans shows a young woman in red lipstick, eyes closed, a man’s hands on her head, in a nightclub. This image from 1989, which appears on the cover of the historian Anton Jäger’s new book, Hyperpolitics, captured a sort of beginning. The weight of history is over, and the music can sway. That world, Jäger suggests, is both still with us and long gone. The rich democracies—most of his examples come from Western Europe, though he keeps an eye on the United States—still live in a universe of instant, individualized gratifications. But now, thanks to streaming and delivery, they are largely available at home, making even the thumping nightclub itself an object of nostalgia.Whether it closed in September 2001, March 2003, or September 2008, the era of “post-politics” augured by the fall of the Berlin Wall is long over. By the 2010s, history returned and so did large-scale contentious politics, exploding far beyond the staid boundaries of formal institutions, in wave after wave of protest, copycat protest, and counterprotest. Yet, in a fundamental paradox, after all the mass action, little remained in the way of institutional residue or durable victory. For all the differences between Black Lives Matter and Stop the Steal, Jäger writes—and one might add Occupy Wall Street and Rhodes Must Fall—“these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.” “Incessant yet uncoordinated excitation” makes for a politics that raises hopes only soon to dash them.The two major factors Jäger sees as shaping the political landscape are, then, the politicization of society and the institutionalization of politics. Our present era of hyperpolitics is simultaneously politicized but not institutionalized. The placid years after 1989 were low on both dimensions. By contrast, the age of mass parties and thick civil society was high on both—a richer and more totalizing associational world, encompassing parties all the way from fascist to conservative to socialist to communist, in times more heroic and tragic than our own benighted present.Hyperpolitics, Jäger argues, poses a larger problem for the left than for the right. Here the analysis picks up from his previous book, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession, an unsparing account of the left populist revival written with Arthur Borriello. If the right’s most perfervid dreams are yet to be fulfilled, right populism marches forward nonetheless. Whether the right owes its relative success to the last embers of social cohesion that remain in police unions, gun clubs, and the like, or simply finds voters amid social anomie and the aftermath of failed countermobilizations, the left requires what Antonio Gramsci called “a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action,” and that is nowhere to be found. Instead, “the left’s hyperpolitical mobilization detonates like a neutron bomb: a moment ago, thousands of people were protesting in a square—now they have vanished, with the assailed power infrastructure intact.”The United States, with its fragmented political system and its overheated attention economy, has proved particularly susceptible to hyperpolitics. Belgian-born, U.K.-based Jäger is not the first foreigner to be dazzled by the sheer over the topness of American politics, marveling at “WWE wrestlers and country stars pledging to physically shield their candidate from harm at the RNC” and “Georgia rappers counting down to state announcements at the DNC.” But neither does he treat the election of Donald Trump as an exceptional moment in the country’s history or the anti-democratic features of the American Constitution as a suitable explanation for our present discontents. Besides, hyperpolitics is far from unique to the United States. As his examples show, variations on this same story recur in parliamentary and presidential systems, and with first-past-the-post and proportional electoral systems. Institutional reforms might help, but deep explanations lie elsewhere.What gives the book its bite is its reading of “Putnam from the left.” In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam traced how the decline of community groups and civic ties in the United States had produced an atomized polity. For Putnam, writing in and of the post-politics era, the story was about civil society itself. He evinced little interest in union decline, neoliberalism, or the changing characteristics of capitalism. Nor, beyond noting falling rates of voter turnout, did he pay much heed to the decline in parties’ presence on the ground. A commission of worthies under Putnam’s leadership, whose most notable member was an Illinois state senator named Barack Obama, offered “150 things you can do to build social capital,” among them “Hold a neighborhood barbecue,” and “Give your park a weatherproof chess/checkers board.”For Jäger, the loosening of social ties that Putnam identified explains not only declining institutionalization, with the erosion of unions and the disappearance of the thick organizational culture around mass parties, but also just why increased politicization would fail to stick into durable organization, and why that would hurt the left. That is a story not just of the endless scroll of clickable content but also of the “wasteland of sociability”—a void in the place of the associations that had forged political and class consciousness. Jäger quotes the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás’s observation that the “counter-power of working-class trade unions and parties” was undergirded by “their own savings banks, health and pension funds, newspapers, extramural popular academies, workingmen’s clubs, libraries, choirs, brass bands, engagé intellectuals, songs, novels, philosophical treatises, learned journals, pamphlets, well-entrenched local governments, temperance societies—all with their own mores, manners and style.” These social worlds formed political loyalties far thicker and more durable than anything on offer today outside a few religious groups, melding deep commitments with ongoing social and communal ties.At one level, this is all romantic stuff, a portal into a vanished world. But it’s also a very real entry into contemporary debates. If the cell with high politicization and low institutionalization is bad for left politics, and the crises roiling the rich democracies aren’t going anywhere, then the only way out is back to the high politicization, high institutionalization world of mass politics. Creations of the nineteenth century, the trade union and the mass party reached their apogee in the twentieth and lumber on in the twenty-first. As “power resources,” in the Swedish sociologist Walter Korpi’s phrase, they remain peerless, serving not just as receptacles of social energy but shapers of social struggle. All sorts of nonprofit groups claim to represent the downtrodden, but as anyone who’s ever tried to play power politics from the left can well attest, it’s still unions that have real ties with their members and also the muscle to get things done. And, love it or loathe it, there’s no getting around party politics.Jäger’s call for institution-building cuts against post-2010 strategies for electoral insurgencies and social movements, which feared that formal structures would sap the grassroots energies that propelled them in the first place. They came to that conclusion from different directions. At one pole lay the horizontalism of Occupy. The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, its guiding spirit, sought “the continual creation and elaboration of new institutions, based on new, non-alienating modes of interaction.” At another pole lay the left populists who emphasized direct connection between leader and people, and admired charismatic figures like Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Yet their differences are more in degree than kind: The anarchists and populists alike had little use for formal institutions in general, or for political parties in particular.Jäger’s heroic view of parties also stands in contrast with much mainstream political science, which sees parties principally as the vehicles for ambitious politicians or advocates of particular policies. Parties are useful for their limited purposes in holding a ballot line and organizing a legislature but hardly shape adherents’ lives and worldviews. That instrumental approach largely comports with the dominant trends in ever more professionalized contemporary campaigning, obsessed with carefully calibrated messages delivered directly to individual voters. The political consultants are correct that swing voters have the memories of goldfish, but they have forgotten the critical older lesson that hegemony takes time, and see no point in maintaining steady connections with voters.Is there a way back to a world of thick associations? Hyperpolitics is not a work of strategy, and rightly so, but the biggest unanswered questions concern just what social factions can be organized and how. Left parties can no longer rely on their historic base in the working class and are increasingly aligned with a smaller, better-heeled cohort of highly educated voters (what the economist Thomas Piketty and his co-authors Amory Gethin and Clara Martínez-Toledano have termed the Brahmin Left). Jäger gestures at but does not really grapple with how to build a winning coalition under these circumstances. Questions of what the contemporary version of the old social democratic stamp club looks like in practice, and what social niche it occupies, are deeply intertwined, and the more vexed for all that. If, as is typical with attempts at social renewal, the choirs and brass bands reach only into the educated base, that fails to solve the fundamental problem. Attempts to circumvent it and go directly to the working class risk the very patronizing condescension, a contemporary version of Marie Antoinette dressing up in peasant garb, that got center-left parties in this mess in the first place. Readers less doctrinaire than Jäger will note that parties can do only so much to shape the electorate, and that to some degree they have to meet voters where they are—not just ideologically but in their willingness to engage in long-standing, thick activity at all. Where voters are these days is mostly on the couch, scrolling through their phones.In American politics, Hyperpolitics marks the leftward edge of what the political scientist Henry Farrell has termed “partyism,” a very loose tendency that sees robust formal parties, especially at the state and local level, as essential to any serious prospects for democratic revival. For some partyists, the failure of Obama for America to institutionalize itself after the 2008 campaign looms large. Another strand, distantly descended from efforts in the 1960s and ’70s, looks to the kind of deep organizing characteristic of the most effective community groups, such as ISAIAH, a statewide multifaith organizing group in Minnesota. Other partyists emphasize just how unfun politics is now, and want to reengage by just getting people together. The bullet points in one such list, from the writer Ned Resnikoff, mention happy hours, trivia nights, and movie watch parties.Its practitioners share a family resemblance in their belief that parties past might offer lessons to lead us out of our present discontents. The sky-high turnouts of the late nineteenth century in the North—when more than 80 percent of eligible voters (all men) showed up on Election Day—emerged from top-to-bottom organizing. Parties paid for public spectacle such as torchlight parades to demonstrate their popular appeal. And although the Wide Awake parades in support of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 tend to get viewed more fondly than the party battles of the Gilded Age, the whole approach offers models for mass politics: engage the electorate at scale and in person all year round.Northern Democrats of the long New Deal era also remain an exemplar of a mass politics that delivered the goods. The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party of Hubert Humphrey’s state and the UAW-led party in Michigan stand out as leading lights of a powerful laborite tradition. State Democratic parties, linked with unions from the old CIO and middle-class grassroots reform activists, backed social programs and, antagonizing the Southern Democrats who dominated Congress, pushed a sometimes-reluctant party toward the policies that would culminate in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Amid all the warm remembrances, one might add just how hard-nosed the old-school party politics was: a matter of getting everyone in line and not just showing up for neighbors. The Brooklyn Democratic leader Meade Esposito, a mentor to both Donald Trump and Shirley Chisholm (American politics can be a very small place), famously kept a baseball bat under his desk.Partyism, as that history suggests, encompasses plenty of approaches to party that stand in productive tension with what Jäger has in mind. Self-described “new political realists” look to the machines of yore and celebrate their small-minded transactionalism as antidotes to contemporary polarization. Others of a more Tocquevillean bent see parties as schools of citizenship, teaching the democratic lessons of persuading others, recognizing the merits in opposing viewpoints, and accepting losses and moving on. Meanwhile, normie Democrats aplenty want to connect with voters in ways that feel more meaningful than a door knock from a stranger just before Election Day. Whether all these tendencies can together or separately revive the Democratic Party and reach beyond its core college-educated cadres will do much to determine the fate of party and republic.Jäger can be self-indulgent, more impressive than persuasive as he wallows in his erudition and delights in his aperçus. When he reproduces a long blockquote from Eric Hobsbawm recalling the last legal march of the Communist Party of Germany on January 25, 1933, he conveys ample pathos but is unlikely to win over anyone skeptical of the Communists’ approach. The book moves far, far too quickly, even granted its limited space at barely a hundred pages, with scant attention to qualifiers or counterarguments, still less the messy realm of evidence, whether in election returns or public policies. Too often, others’ conclusions are taken as facts. It has its genesis partly in an essay Jäger wrote for New Left Review, and the characteristic high NLR style amplifies his tendencies toward hyperbole. He brings to mind Daniel Bell’s old self-description that he was “a specialist in generalizations,” which is a double-edged sword.The boundaries between politics and aesthetics are fuzzy—and, let’s be honest, real political work is mostly unglamorous drudgery, no matter how gorgeous the framed posters may look to us now. The old world of mass politics survives in memory only “when a certain kind of person,” the political theorist Jordan Ecker wrote in a review of The Populist Moment, “reads an NYRB novel about interwar Europe.” The danger is that it’s all a game of signifiers, not a cri de cœur. Don’t we all want to LARP our favorite cult classics?Still, Hyperpolitics is a book of considerable substance underneath all the sheen. At a time when the various enthusiasms of the 2010s seem faraway indeed, no matter how low Trump’s approval ratings sink, and when Democrats’ sheer desire to win seems to blot out any questions of long-term reorientation of state and society, Jäger stands out for the sweep and force of his analysis. The rich democracies in the 2020s find themselves in a logjam. If it breaks, the waters will not be rushing leftward. Anyone looking for an alternative will have to confront Anton Jäger’s stark conclusion that the left needs “a reinstitutionalization of political engagement,” and that without it “its adversaries will continue to enjoy a decisive advantage.”Jäger writes very much as a millennial socialist. The 2010s left’s heady moments arrived as youthful exuberance, and the disappointments of the 2020s manifest as generational angst, not just political frustration. Today’s defenders of institutions and the virtues of community typically congregate on the soggy ground of nostalgia for bipartisan—or, more broadly, trans-ideological—comity, however bitter their denunciations of Trumpism. Institutions tamp down conflict, rather than pointing it in a given direction. What gives Hyperpolitics its bracing quality despite all the preening is that Jäger turns that familiar formulation around. With grand ambitions to theorize a left that can win, he rediscovers the radical possibilities in institutional thinking.
In a viral video captured during the ICE surge in Portland, Maine, an agent pointed his phone at a constitutional observer, snapped a photo, and offered a chilling, off-the-cuff warning: She was being added to a “database” of “domestic terrorists.” The brief exchange offered a glimpse into the petty and vindictive mindset of ICE agents. It also offered us a window into the mechanics of a hyperefficient, privatized surveillance state, one that bypasses the pesky barriers of the Fourth Amendment by putting our user data on the government’s credit card.Last month’s Americanization of TikTok is perhaps the zenith of this strategy. While liberal hawks cheered the platform’s transition to the jumble of jargon now known officially as TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC as a win for national security, they ignored the details written in the fine print. TikTok’s Privacy Policy has for some time included tracking of location and citizenship status (among other identity markers, such as sex). They’ve recently updated their language to add more specificity about the personal data they track so as to be in compliance with state laws.* By housing TikTok’s data on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure—a firm whose multibillion-dollar existence is owed in part to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement contracts, and whose co-founder Larry Ellison recently bragged about AI ushering in an era where “citizens are on their best behavior”—the government has finally achieved its aim of securing the app by integrating it into its domestic surveillance dragnet. Considering the drive to secure TikTok was driven by fears of what the notoriously repressive nation of China might do with our private data, this outcome is, at the very least, highly ironic.The technical wizardry of this surveillance relies on your Mobile Advertising ID, or MAID, a unique string of alphanumeric characters assigned to every smartphone. Every time an app, be it TikTok or a simple weather tracker, makes a bid to show you an advertisement, if your location services are enabled, it shares both your MAID and your precise GPS coordinates to thousands of private bidders. In the past, this metadata has been used by the Pentagon to identify targets.Data brokers like Venntel and Babel Street harvest these “bid-stream” crumbs into massive, searchable oceans of movement. For ICE, this means they no longer need a wiretap; they can access a digital twin of your life, where your TikTok scrolling habits are pinned to a physical map of your home, workplace, and your child’s school or day care. The Fourth Amendment nominally requires a warrant and probable cause to search your person or effects. But in the age of surveillance capitalism, the Department of Homeland Security has discovered a loophole: Why bother with a judge when you can just buy the data from a private broker? This is the spending-around strategy. By leveraging data originating from TikTok and similar platforms, ICE no longer needs to infiltrate communities. They simply tap into the flow of data already being harvested by private entities, allowing them to target both the undocumented and the political opposition. Once this data enters the DHS ecosystem, it doesn’t sit in a silo. It’s fed into a high-tech meat grinder of enforcement tools designed to identify and disappear people with industrial efficiency. These include ICE’s ELITE app (developed by Palantir), which fuses government and private data to generate neighborhood maps and individual dossiers of targets, each with an individualized “confidence score.” This app can tap into everything from Flock license plate readers to Ring cameras, allowing ICE to follow targets without being physically present. One can easily imagine a scenario where data originating from TikTok provides the last missing piece—user location and citizenship status—that ICE needs to green-light one of its raids.Perhaps most dangerously, ICE is now utilizing advanced social media monitoring to perform “sentiment analysis.” By scraping TikTok and other platforms, they can monitor the emotional and political temperature of entire geographic areas, identifying resistance hot spots. This completely undermines the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment.Legally, this system is built on the crumbling foundation of the third-party doctrine, a legal relic from the 1970s. This doctrine posits that individuals forfeit their “reasonable expectation of privacy” the moment they “voluntarily” share information with a third party, like a bank, a phone company, or a social media app.While the Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling suggested that tracking a person’s location via cell towers requires a warrant, DHS has sidestepped this by arguing that purchased data is fundamentally different from subpoenaed data. In the eyes of DHS, when ICE buys a location profile from a broker, it isn’t conducting a search of a person, it’s completing a commercial transaction with a business.It increasingly seems that the Americanization of TikTok was never about protecting us from a foreign adversary. It was a tactical acquisition of digital infrastructure. Trump’s DHS is treating the Bill of Rights like a market inefficiency—a cost of doing business that can be mitigated through the right corporate partnership. In this case, it’s working hand in glove with the social media platform favored by America’s most politically active demographic cohort. Fortunately, there is a legislative solution. Congress should move immediately to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, or FANFSA. This law would prohibit law enforcement and intelligence agencies from purchasing data, such as a user’s location or viewing history, that would otherwise require a warrant, court order, or subpoena. The House passed the bill with bipartisan support in 2024 before it stalled in the Senate.The legal architecture of FANFSA is designed to codify and expand upon the Supreme Court’s Carpenter ruling. In that case, the court recognized that the “near perfect surveillance” enabled by digital location data requires a warrant, even if that data is held by a third party. However, Carpenter left a gaping hole: While it restricted the government from compelling companies to hand over data without a warrant, it remained silent on the government simply purchasing that same data on the open market.FANFSA seeks to bridge this gap by amending the Stored Communications Act to prohibit law enforcement and intelligence agencies from using “anything of value” (in this case, taxpayer dollars) to bypass judicial oversight. By doing so, the Act effectively asserts that the third-party doctrine cannot be used as a commercial loophole to circumvent the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.The Americanization of TikTok has also introduced a more visible form of suppression through the algorithmic throttling of dissent. In the wake of recent ICE shootings in Minneapolis, users and high-profile creators alike reported that anti-ICE videos were instantly met with “zero views” or flagged as “ineligible for recommendation,” effectively purging them from the platform’s influential “For You” feed.The new TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC attributed these irregularities to a convenient data center power outage at its Oracle-hosted facilities. While the public attention this episode garnered will make it more conspicuous if user content gets throttled on TikTok again, the tools are there: By leveraging shadow bans and aggressive content moderation, TikTok can, if it wanted to, ensure that any visual evidence of ICE’s overreach is silenced before it reaches the masses.When the government can buy its way around the Constitution, the result is what we saw in Portland: an ICE agent labeling a citizen a “terrorist” for exercising her First Amendment rights. If Congress allows these private data loopholes to stand, ICE’s database will soon include anyone who dares to criticize the administration. And content filtering will ensure that any video record of ICE violating our civil liberties will remain unseen.When that happens, the Roberts court won’t need to gut the First and Fourth Amendments. It can just wait until everyone agrees to the privacy policy.*This article originally misidentified TikTok’s privacy policy. It also misidentified the extant privacy policy as an updated one.This article has been updated throughout for clarity.
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