Mass institutions remain hollowed out even amid revived political energy

Evidence

Two decades of political turmoil later, these testimonies feel at once familiar and strange, like one of Magritte’s domestic interiors. The individualization and the decline of collective institutions they registered have not been halted. Aside from a few outliers, political parties have not regained their members. Churches have not refilled their pews. Unions have not been organizationally resurrected. Electoral competition is still highly constrained, driven by a narrow cartel of career politicians and specialists ever at the mercy of hostile markets. Across the West, civil society remains mired in a deep and protracted crisis, with political action monopolized by NGOs, online personas, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists. At least in one abiding sense, this chapter of the postpolitical saga is not closed. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 70

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the load-bearing hinge of the whole argument: individualization and institutional decline persist even as politics returns — the precise paradox the hyperpolitics diagnosis explains.
• XREF: The ‘hollowed-out intermediary institutions’ list directly parallels the reader’s stated interest in how parties, unions, and churches stopped converting feeling into force.

Related

• The hollowing of mass institutions has not reversed since the 1990s (similarity 0.94)
• Post-politics gave way directly to hyper-politics without restoring mass organization (similarity 0.82)
• Mass political rebirth after 2008 produced a hybrid surpassing prior postpolitics (similarity 0.80)
• Party democracy’s decline also destroyed the intermediary institutions linking citizens to the state (similarity 0.78)