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.
~ Anton Jäger via The New York Times

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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.
~ Anton Jäger via The New York Times

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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.
~ Anton Jäger via The New York Times

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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.
~ Anton Jäger via The New York Times

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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.
~ Anton Jäger via The New York Times

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Compared with their European counterparts, both American political 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.
~ Anton Jäger via The New York Times

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