These days everything is political — is that bad for politics?
Writing in the 1850s, at the advent of what we would come to understand as the popular press — which is to say, periodicals for mass distribution, rather than aimed at paid-up members of unions and parties, or mercantilists with particular interests in, say, the price of cotton — Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard diagnosed that the invention of “opinion” solved a problem created by the newspapers themselves. For while the papers brought distant events “near” to readers, it did not expand their agency or capacity to act “morally” upon those events. The news informed them, but also made them feel more powerless. But then “opinion” came along and added an emotional dimension to news consumption: not just what happened, but what to make of it — how to feel about it. Before long, Kierkegaard noted, having a strong opinion became, in itself, a moral act. The opinion could be attained cheaply (for the price of the newspaper), it could be wholly derivative (and so lack the element of authenticity, of inner struggle and therefore responsibility), it could be displayed strongly (to the extent that it could be “worn”, like fashion, as an expression of oneself) and have no bearing whatsoever on events. But the opinion holders themselves felt like they’d done something meaningful. In this way, said Kierkegaard, intensity of feeling with an absence of “interiority”, a sense of moral agency with impotence. Though the differences between the media in Kierkegaard’s time and our own social-media saturated age are vast, his diagnosis is nonetheless a salutary one. Emotion is, after all, the currency of contemporary politics. Indeed, it is the form our politics takes. It can coalesce digitally around a cause célèbre and spill out onto the streets in mass demonstrations. It can sweep incumbents from power and elevate firebrands promising to dismantle the status quo. Intensity of feeling is often the strongest indicator of voter turnout in places like the United States. At a time when strong feeling translates to engagement, and engagement is that most valuable of commodities in the attention economy, it’s little wonder that powerful political emotions have come to define our lives online. Everything, it seems, is political. On the one hand, this has led to a certain distortion of our understanding of politics. Far from entailing principled compromise, patient coalition building and gradual, unglamorous reform, what Anton Jäger calls “hyperpolitics” thrives on clear-cut divisions, uncompromising demands, pervasive distrust and flashes of outrage. But as Jäger points out, hyperpolitics tends to be politically inconsequential. It is an aggregated, destructive “no” without the capacity to mobilise a broad-based, inclusive “yes”. This is what makes our politics feel so pendular, so inconstant, so unstable, so unlikely to coalesce around an issue long enough to effect change. On the other hand, these flashes of outrage and lack of tolerance for gradual change come on the back of decades of prevarication and political unresponsiveness to the concrete realities of voters. If the emotions that course through our politics today express a desire for agency, it is only because a sense of political agency has been steadily eroded. Perhaps the question now is whether a certain political intensity can give rise to more durable, inclusive, cooperative forms of collective mobilisation. But, of course, this question implies a darker alternative: what happens when intense political emotions — resentment, anger, contempt, powerlessness, humiliation — find their coherence, their explanatory power, in more thoroughgoing, even atavistic systems of belief and belonging? When incoherence seeks out authority? READING: Waleed Aly, Time of Monsters What Future for Liberalism?, Quarterly Essay 103 (September 2026). Intifar Chowdhury, “We’re all ‘political’ now — but can that lead to real change?”, The Conversation (14 August 2026). Guest: Intifar Chowdhury, Lectur