It is a familiar conundrum by now. Yet in the opening weeks of 2026 — as President Trump kidnapped a foreign leader, threatened to invade an ally and looked on as federal agents detained and killed American citizens in the country’s streets — a slightly tired question has resounded with new urgency. How did the United States get here?
For chroniclers raking over the ashes of the past decade’s tumult, Mr. Trump is at the heart of the matter. Cupidity, ruthlessness, charisma: All are offered as explanations for his rise and conduct alike. In their laser focus on the man himself, however, such analyses can read like compliments rather than critiques, as if Mr. Trump did it all by himself. Inevitably, his relish for unilateral action only reinforces such a personalist interpretation.
This is no new problem with strongmen. In the 19th century, Karl Marx faulted critics of Napoleon III — the nephew of the first Napoleon who managed to get himself crowned emperor of France in 1852 — for losing sight of the structures that enabled him to ascend to power. In such readings, he appeared as “a bolt from the blue” with “a personal power of initiative unparalleled in world history,” even as opponents depicted him as a grotesque upstart. Studies of Mr. Trump similarly pull in two directions: Both a buffoon and a mastermind, he appears as a figure who somehow blundered to the top of the American state.
Others, to be sure, have looked at the larger social forces that pushed Mr. Trump to the fore — the backing from key sections of business, the fissuring of American society and the toll of decades of deindustrialization and economic inequality. These must be part of any adequate analytical picture. Critics have often focused their ire on Mr. Trump’s enablers, too, including the G.O.P. grandees who accommodated him.
Yet there has been less talk about the Grand Old Party itself, now solidly regrouped around its redeemer. According to political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, the party had become “hollow” — a hollowing that made Republicans particularly vulnerable to Mr. Trump’s dominion. Once again, this requires an adjustment of perspective. Rather than peer at the match that set everything ablaze, we must ask how the environment became so flammable in the first place.
Here the party rather than the man is paramount. For it is the long-term weakening of the Republican Party that explains Mr. Trump’s stride to political power. Given how flush it is with donor money, this might seem like a counterintuitive conclusion. Yet it is precisely the party’s loss of independence that has made it prey to a Trumpian hostile takeover. Lacking infrastructure and personnel, the Republican Party has become a bidding hall for private donors. Of this bazaar, Mr. Trump is now lord and master.
It is tempting to view this as a specifically American development. Admittedly, the Republican Party is singular in its rightward lurch in the past decade: No other comparable European center-right outfit has been thus transformed into a vehicle for one-man nativism. Compared with their European counterparts, both American parties are strange beasts: no members, open primaries and a seemingly unlimited access to private funds. To inhabitants of the Old World, they seem more corporate brand than mass organization.
Yet for all its extremity, the Republican Party exemplifies a trend affecting all Western democracies. Since the 1990s, political parties across the West have been hemorrhaging members amid a wider weakening of internal structures. While especially damaging on the left, always reliant on popular support, the trend affected forces across the spectrum. As a void opened between voters and parties, many citizens stopped engaging with them and even decided to opt out of voting altogether. The result has been a steady erosion of mainstream parties’ electoral support.
With this came a financial switch. Over the same period, Western parties have increasingly relied on external funds rather than membership dues. This has made them more open to business influence, with all the volatility that entails, and liable to capture by cranks and extremists. Across Europe, traditional parties are a shadow of what they once were. Socially uprooted and economically dependent, they too have been hollowed out.
In any story of today’s political disorders, this should be no subplot. At least since World War II, the West has been defined by its party system: different in each place but usually involving a duopoly of ruling parties fringed by smaller outfits, each robustly anchored in society. The system was the groundwork on which Western political life was built — unobtrusive, unremarked upon, yet quietly essential.
After tottering awhile, it has started to give way. The consequences are legion: emboldened far rights, poisoned public spheres, fissiparous loyalties and a political future defined more by helplessness than by choice. These are the symptoms of our new, hyperpolitical age — where politics is all around and yet somehow eludes stable forms.
The modern mass party reached its apogee in the middle of the 20th century. Yet it was most memorably portrayed in the interwar period, the era of continental fascism, when hundreds of thousands of Europeans became far-right partisans and paramilitary violence spilled into the continent’s streets. From his prison cell, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci compared the mass party to the prince feted in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. The modern equivalent of Machiavelli’s ruler — the definitive master of a state — could not “be a real person,” Gramsci wrote, but had to be “the political party.”
In the decades after, Gramsci’s prediction largely came true. Across the West, voters became tied to mass parties, chiefly on the center-left and center-right. Their names were as familiar as the furniture: in Britain, the Conservatives and Labour; in Germany, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats; in France, the Gaullists and the Socialists; in America, of course, the Democrats and the Republicans. The polarization was less pronounced in Northern Europe, but that was because of more parties, not fewer. The party system in general, involving the regular transfer of power and scores of lifelong members, flourished.
In Gramsci’s own country of Italy, however, its downfall was dizzyingly sudden. In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union broke apart, the Communist Party liquidated itself. Then, after a tumultuous anti-corruption campaign dragged down the whole political class, the two other parties that had defined the country’s postwar period — the Christian Democrats and the Socialists — followed suit. Into the void bounded the billionaire media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, retilting the political landscape around his telegenic personality. Gone were the anchored parties; in came Mr. Berlusconi’s personalized outfit and his opponents.
As with Mr. Trump and the Republican Party today, this was an outlier case. Yet the 1990s brought growing disaffection with politics on both sides of the Atlantic: Party membership dropped, strike activity slumped, and fewer citizens voted or turned out to protest. A steady retreat from the public sphere was underway; political theorists began to describe the age as one of “post-politics.” No longer were political affairs on Western citizens’ minds, with the process given over to career politicians and specialists. The party was a scheming prince no more, but a hurried professional.
The effects proved epochal. Across Europe, mainstream parties lost their supremacy. In some cases, like France, it was dramatic, as both major forces of the postwar period were reduced to a rump; in others, like Germany, it was gentler but no less visible, with the two main parties’ vote share dropping sharply. In Britain and Spain, leading parties went into coalition with smaller, younger outfits, unable to command a majority on their own. Throughout, a pattern of decline remained unmistakable. Today, the Western party looks more like a street hawker, desperately seeking customers.
The eclipse of traditional parties has not led to the withering of political activity, however. On the contrary, it has gone hand in hand with much greater politicization. In this decade, politics seems to be everywhere, all at once. In America, the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 were potentially the largest in the country’s history, with some estimates putting the number of participants at over 20 million. Turnout in European and American elections is healthy; protests are recurrent and intense; political violence, including assassination attempts, is making a brutal comeback. On social media, in turn, political discourse has become both omnipresent and diffuse. Clearly, “post-politics” has come to an end.
This effusion often invites comparisons to Gramsci’s time, the high tide of political activism. One fact, however, voids the analogy: Western societies today, unlike during the 1920s and 1930s, are experiencing a continuous erosion of institutional structures. Trade unions, civic associations, social clubs, volunteer networks and churches: All are in abeyance. Both the Jan. 6 riots and the Black Lives Matter protests — to take the two most eye-catching examples of political contestation in America — were large and energetic. But they also proved very short-lasting and birthed neither durable infrastructure nor dues-paying memberships.
The result is a peculiar scissor shape: on the one hand, intense political activity; on the other, continued institutional sclerosis. Where in the 1990s we had parties without politics, we now have politics without parties. This is the strange confluence I have termed hyperpolitics. For traditional political parties, the previous bedrock of Western political stability, it is a lethal tonic.
Nowhere is this more visible than in what some consider the first mass party in Western history: the British Conservative Party. Often enough, historians locate the birth of mass politics on the left. Yet before the German socialists broke onto their country’s electoral scene in the 1890s, British Tories were already busy crafting a mass organization. With universal suffrage on its way, the incentives were clear. British conservatives did not lapse into fatalism about the mandate it would grant to radical forces. To them, reconciling property and democracy was anything but impossible.
The result was a political ecosystem with branches throughout British society, from the so-called Primrose League to the Conservative Clubs. Paul McCartney and John Lennon played their first gig together at such a club, at a time when Tory organizations continued to thrive. Alongside this rich braid of associational life, the party could claim an astonishing postwar high of 2.8 million members — far more than Labour. The Conservatives may have appealed most directly to the affluent and privileged, but they were deeply embedded across society.
By the 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher in control of the party, this position no longer appeared so sure. Her government made the conscious choice to weaken British society’s grip on the state and liberalize the economy. This move had its advantages — foreign competition could further crush trade union strength — but it also threatened the social bases of the right, from shopkeepers to local gentry. As a political calculation it was nonetheless logical: There were ways of winning elections that did not presuppose mass organization. After all, the Tories mostly controlled the press and could hire consultancy firms to rally voters.
In the late 1990s, the limits of this strategy began to reveal themselves. The British press threw in its lot with the modernized Labour Party of Tony Blair, which proved itself more adept at focus-group electioneering. For the Conservatives, a long spell in the wilderness beckoned. Fortuitously, the financial crash returned it to power, albeit in coalition; in the second half of the 2010s, the party was able to exploit the cleavages caused by the Brexit vote to survive. But the membership continued to dwindle. In the party’s most recent leadership election, the first since being cast out of power, just 95,000 voted.
Today the party is on the verge of extinction, threatened by the rise of the far-right Reform U.K. A steady drip of defections has turned into a stream, as even high-profile former Tory ministers jump ship. Previously generous donors are crossing over, too. To these absconders, the game is up: Significantly outstripping the Tories in the polls, Reform is well on its way to becoming the real party of the right. On current projections, the Conservatives are likely to be reduced to rubble in the next election, a watershed whose significance would be hard to overstate.
Reform is itself an exemplar of the new hyperpolitical age. It was initially formed by Nigel Farage, its pugnacious leader, as a business, not a party; now it claims over 250,000 members. But these are not party members in the traditional sense: They remain more like digital supporters or online adherents. Thriving off surges of media attention, savvy use of social media and the outsize personality of Mr. Farage — a true hyperleader, as the Italian political scientist Paolo Gerbaudo would say — the party has traded depth for width.
Such attenuation has its advantages, of course. With voters flocking to its banner, the party has a serious chance to form the next government. Yet such swarms of support are also difficult to command. They instead follow the fluctuations of the political stock market: Investors rush to buy a share but may dump it again tomorrow. In time, too, Mr. Farage may find his paper-thin party hard to control, especially as it inches closer to power.
In the United States, a debate is unfolding about whether ICE might provide civic grounding for an ascendant far right. Twentieth-century fascism, after all, found a welcome base in the security forces. Here again, however, Trumpists are likely to be disappointed. Washington is indeed rolling out an arbitrary and cruel deportation machine. Yet its chaos and dysfunction, with fractured chains of command and officers going rogue, are everywhere to see. For the right, the Trump administration’s emboldening of federal agents promises less social solidity than 24/7 theatrics.
Such symbolism also explains why Mr. Trump has taken aim at Minneapolis, the site of the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2020. Protesters have been remarkably resilient in resisting the onslaught. Yet at the heart of their defiance is “an uneasy paradox,” as Jay Caspian Kang recently wrote, in which “millions of people are willing to participate in widespread protests, but few appear to believe that they will lead to much change.”
It is a quandary typical of our age. Without political parties and the lattice of institutions underpinning them, hyperpolitics will retain its staying power — on both the left and the right. True disorder may be just beginning.
Anton Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer. He is a lecturer in politics at Oxford University and the author of the forthcoming book “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences.”
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