Post-2008 antipolitics targeted elites and the establishment, not the state as such

Evidence

When observers began applying the term “antipolitics” to the protest movements that coalesced after 2008, they did so independently of this earlier Eastern European iteration. Their antipolitics instead referred to a different type of antagonism, unmissable in the slogans of the Indignados or Occupy Wall Street. The Occupy protesters identified as part of the “99 percent,” challenging the domination of the “1 percent.” Spanish demonstrators chanted “¡Que se vayan todos!” (They should all go!) and “¡No nos representan!” (They don’t represent us!), with framing which opposed el pueblo (the people) to la casta (the caste) of capitalists, technocrats, and politicians. The “anti-” here was directed against the status quo, against elites, against the establishment, an orientation also visible in the definition of populism proffered by political scientists such as Cas Mudde, Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, and Jan-Werner Müller, who declared it a “thin ideology” based, in Müller’s words, on “an opposition between corrupt elites and a morally pure, homogeneous people that can do no wrong.” — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 182

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the 2010s Western use of ‘antipolitics’ against elites from the Eastern European antipolitics against the state — a definitional contrast central to Jäger’s periodization.
• XREF: Connects to Müller’s and Mudde’s thin-ideology definition of populism and to the distinction between this Western formulation and the Eastern European antipolitics discussed earlier in the book.