Review of Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences by Anton Jäger (Verso, 2026).
In a particularly memorable scene from Eddington (2025), set during the George Floyd protests of 2020, high school student Brian (Cameron Mann) is attempting to explain his newfound racial consciousness to his parents at the dinner table. Brian — who, like his parents, is white — tells them about the need for “changing institutions, dismantling whiteness, and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself.”
“But we’re pretty much light-years away from that,” he concludes.
“What the f—k are you talking about?” Brian’s father replies after a long pause. “You’re white.”
Director Ari Aster plays the exchange for laughs, relying on the fact that similar conversations were commonplace at family dinners, in faculty lounges, in corporate offices, and elsewhere across America during the summer of 2020, reaching even into rural small towns like the fictional Eddington, New Mexico, of the film, thanks to the contagious power of social media.
The scene helps illustrate a core thesis of Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics. While Black Lives Matter demonstrations sparked by the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor amounted to the largest protest movement in US history, they accomplished very little. The outbursts were fed by and fed off of a febrile discourse cycle on social media and in traditional outlets that pulled in even comfortable, previously apolitical, young white people like Brian in remote corners of the country.
The protests may have led to some minor victories, like the mandating of body cameras on police officers and changes in attitudes, but at the national level the material facts remain stubbornly unchanged. The rate of police killings even appears to have slightly increased since 2020, and the deeper inequalities that helped inspire the protests of course persist.
It is a case of “extreme politicization without…
Auteur: Nick French
