A New Anti-Political Fervor

It’s said that we live in a crisis of democracy, but it would be better stated that we live in a crisis of politics. Throughout the world, and especially in the West, an anti-political mood has taken hold. 

Faith in several key national institutions is at an all-time low in the U.S. To many voters, political outsiders are more compelling than experienced politicians. Anger toward elites is commonplace as income inequality rises. The social climate is growing lonelier and more frayed. Community life has suffered, worsened by internet use. We trust each other less, and we are more anxious and pessimistic about the future. 

For most of the 20th century, politics and even political parties were viewed as a home outside of home by many, fortified by strong social bases of support. Unions, churches, civic organizations and local community life made up the foundation. This rootedness created both manageable stability for the state and meaning for people.

These places of belonging have since declined, and so too has politics declined as a home. What has emerged in response is an untethered and distrusting public. Historically, transitional periods of great economic and social dislocation like ours are also times of heightened anti-political sentiments. Everyday people become detached from and even suspicious of their public representatives. 

What makes today’s situation remarkable is how forcefully anti-political feelings have risen across many different countries, all at the same time. Recent polling shows dissatisfaction with democracy across 12 leading high-income nations at a median of 64% — a record high. These trends extend far beyond the Western world. 2025 has seen unprecedented revolts in Asia motivated by a strong sense of disgust toward politicians and nepotism. Similar anger has fueled protests in Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar and elsewhere across Africa. 

Politicians and elites now find themselves “ruling the void,” in the words of political theorist Peter Mair.

In this day and age, anti-political feelings tend to manifest as a swarm. Usually online, movements rapidly take shape, organize themselves and then often dissipate as quickly as they appear. United by shared distrust of the political class, the 15-M protests in Spain, Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring were some of the first primarily internet-based, swarm-like movements in the 2010s. “Neither-nor” and “Down with the partycratic dictatorship” were common slogans of the indignados in Spain in 2011. 

More recently, the Yellow Vests formed in France in 2018 as a decentralized swarm against the state. Swarms have even toppled governments — as in Armenia in 2018, Bangladesh in 2024 and Nepal in 2025. Outsider candidates have also embraced the anti-political climate to enter power themselves, with mixed results.

In the past decade, the populist right has had more success capitalizing on the anti-political mood. But anti-politics is a raw public energy, not bound by any political ideology. It is redefining the entire political terrain. Is anti-politics, as The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in 2016, truly the “governing cancer of our time”? Or is it instead society’s antibody response against the state’s failures, a symptom of a deeper transformation?

While periods of anti-political fervor have taken hold just as strongly in the past, our situation today is unique. There are two historical moments that can help us understand what motivates the current frustration and sets it apart. Through this frame, we can better contextualize the U.S. case and also discern what future might come of it.

Anti-politics is a vehicle of discontentment, a real but disorganized spirit of our time, and its destination is an open question.

After World War I

While being held in an Italian prison by fascists in the 1930s, philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci wrote that “at a certain point in their historical lives, social classes become detached from their traditional parties.” 

When ruling elites lose their consensus, he continued, they are “no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’ … this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies and no longer believe what they used to believe previously.”

This insight was the preface to an often-quoted adaptation of his words: Such times are when the “old is dying, and the new is struggling to be born.” This is also when a “great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” 

Gramsci was diagnosing a social climate that had emerged from World War I. The Great War produced homelessness and personal loss on an unprecedented scale. Centuries-old empires like those of the Habsburg Dynasty of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire collapsed. New states emerged from the rubble, and lives in the ones that survived were permanently altered. 

Because everything was so battered, the years between the two world wars were a time of intensely contested mass politics in Europe. People were searching for an identity and desperately sought answers on how to start anew. 

Many spoke openly against parliamentary democracy at the time. The democracies after World War I were hastily constructed and were unable to cope with the tide of popular demands. Rife with factionalism and historical grievances, they were inherently unstable.

Parliamentary democracy, therefore, became an easy whipping post of frustration. In “The Revolt of the Masses,” Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in 1929 likened the anti-political mood of the masses to “mere negation.” The crisis of politics then was mainly channeled by two mass movements: communists and fascists. 

The fascists would ultimately be most successful in converting this anti-political mood into power. By the end of the 1930s, the crisis of politics had transformed the European continent. In 1938, only 13 European states were parliamentary democracies, down from 26 in 1920. 

The damage caused by radical mass parties provoked philosopher Simone Weil to write “On the Abolition of All Political Parties” in 1943. She concluded that the logical endpoint of every party is a monopoly on power at the expense of society. The ultimate goal of a party, she wrote, “is its own growth, without limit.”

The social climate remained distrustful and cynical well into World War II. In “World of Yesterday,” published in 1941, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig looked across Europe and found pessimism everywhere:

The sad irony of the period is that the public, who had grown so cynical of parliamentary politics, now found their frustrations once again exploited and their destiny decided for them, just like in 1914. They had no choice but to fall in line.

“Men went to the front, but not dreaming of becoming heroes,” Zweig wrote. “Nations and individuals felt they were the victims of either ordinary political folly or the power of an incomprehensible and malicious fate.”

Under The Iron Curtain

Unlike during the volatile interwar years, anti-political feelings were forced underground in Eastern Europe after World War II. The public was suppressed under a cult of power ruling like an impenetrable leviathan. In 1956, the Soviet state violently crushed the people’s uprising in Hungary. In 1968, it did the same in Czechoslovakia.

After that tragedy, it became clear to many that politics was a dead end. According to Czech dissident Václav Havel, even though no one believed in the state, one had to “behave as though they did or tolerate them in silence.” The mood was best captured by Polish dissident Jacek Kuroń: “What is to be done when nothing can be done?”

With all political possibilities for change seemingly closed, dissidents instead asked how life should be lived and shared with others. They turned their focus toward civil society, forming a counter-movement that Hungarian writer György Konrád called “anti-politics.”

Anti-politics was a social movement that sought to create a public space separate from the state. It went by many names: “second culture,” “parallel polis,” “politics from below.” As Havel put it, the dissident “has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He offers nothing and promises nothing.” 

Eastern European anti-politics was instead a social project: a moral critique of power rooted in everyday life. Havel famously coined its credo as “living within the truth.” Polish journalist Konstanty Gebert described living within the truth as setting up a “small, portable barricade between me and silence, submission, humiliation, shame.”

Seeing no political possibilities, dissidents reimagined how they should live with others. Their meetings were held underground, in apartments and secret work meetings. They stressed that their actions — even down to their language — were not political but pro-social. They took to creating a second culture through films, novels, poetry, music and other mediums as they explored their extreme conditions. Today, this is commonly looked back upon as the golden age for Eastern European literature and art. 

Ultimately, of course, the dissidents were victorious. They won by remaking the social sphere into something that could bludgeon the state. As the cracks accumulated, Soviet rule collapsed under the weight of its own illegitimacy. Some of the writers and heroes of the anti-political underground would go on to run for office themselves, despite originally promising otherwise. 

The Eastern European case demonstrates how anti-politics reinvents itself with each new set of material circumstances.

Today

For much of the 20th century, it was accepted that political parties had to be linked to civil society organizations for turnout and legitimacy. This made parties more receptive to public pressure; they had to show interest in bread-and-butter deliverables. Parties also relied on the public and its organizations for funding and leaders. 

Over the past few decades, however, civil society organizations have eroded. As a result, today’s parties struggle to draw sustained, mass participation like they did a century ago. The state is also not dominating public life so punitively, like under Soviet rule, that a second culture is needed.

The conditions are categorically different today. As the tense relationship between the state and everyday people is again being renegotiated, its expression will be unique to the 21st century. 

Today’s anti-political mood has been building for some time. In “Ruling the Void,” published in 2013, Mair documented the unusual convergence of trends across all Western democracies: depressed voter turnout, declining party membership, an increase in independents, wild electoral swings and low participation in civil society organizations. These trends have since deepened and calcified. 

Today, voters are less guided by partisan cues. In the U.S., a plurality does not identify with either major party. Consequently, the correlation between one’s class and voter preference has weakened. No longer do voting blocs fit clear schemas and predictive models like they used to. This is the new public that Mair likened to “the void.”

The reason for these changes is longstanding and structural, but the frustration has been intensified by the internet. As Martin Gurri documented in “The Revolt of the Public” in 2014, the internet has undermined the old, top-down mediators of information. Traditional media no longer exclusively sets the agenda and states cannot effectively rule by persuasion alone. Dominant narratives struggle to hold sway. In Gurri’s words, this means “every inch of political space is contested” in a horizontal, decentralized media environment. 

The explosion of information has led to a collapse of meaning, which has been replaced by pure negation. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han succinctly said in a 2022 interview in Noema, “The more we are confronted with information, the more our suspicion grows.” This is natural fuel for anti-politics. Gurri similarly argued that government failure now sets the public agenda. Since meaning can no longer be narrativized from the top down, states are unable to easily hide or excuse their failures like before. 

Rather than affirm the power center, the internet energizes the “world of the very small,” in the words of former President of Armenia and physicist Armen Sarkissian. He has likened the internet’s destabilizing effects to quantum mechanics: “You need just a couple of high-energized particles. They come and hit. And what you get is a chain reaction.” 

In January 2022, Sarkissian fell victim to this very phenomenon, only four years after an internet-based swarm had toppled the Armenian government. He claimed that the public had become obsessed with “all sorts of conspiracy theories and myths” which was starting to affect his health. In a surprise announcement, he resigned and claimed his presidential office did not have sufficient power to influence events. 

Yet, this idea that the internet would deepen the void was not a given. As Gurri writes, implicit in the century-long struggle for suffrage was the belief that “once all the people were inside the system, something magical would happen: the good society.” The internet was once viewed as merely an extension of this long march toward inclusion, one that would only better represent a general interest. 

The internet has instead highlighted the inertia and emptiness of political institutions. Today, with little left sacred, these institutions are readily filled by opportunistic outsiders and other political entrepreneurs, who are also shaping the public conversation. Some cynicism has always been part of democratic society, but it is now easily converted into actionable anger.

While the internet has deepened anti-political feelings, preexisting societal conditions laid the groundwork for this to happen. Since the 1970s, political parties across Western democracies have been hollowed out. Their organizations have grown more closed and insular, relying less and less on their constituents for decision-making and funds. The present-day anger, therefore, is not imagined but rooted in longstanding exclusion.

Mair and political scientist Richard S. Katz argued in their 2018 book that leading Western parties have undergone a process of “cartelization.” Whereas mass parties in the early 20th century were labor-intensive, bottom-up, reformist and relied on members for funding, cartel parties view politics as a profession, depend on a wealthy donor class, possess an in-group mentality and collude with each other to maintain their positions. Because cartel parties rely less on member recruitment, they instead outsource decision-making to institutional bureaucracies, courts and a web of organizations outside of government.

These changes naturally make everyday people feel invisible and secondary. Lacking a direct relationship to the public, political elites are more and more beholden to only themselves. Political parties’ main purpose then becomes simply maintaining their positions. As Mair noted, Western parties have “become agencies that govern rather than represent.” In this dynamic, the public’s role in democracy is largely relegated to being a spectator.

It’s unsurprising that the ballot box has become the natural vehicle for anti-politics. Votes can be sudden reminders to political elites that the public still controls some levers. In recent years, populist movements on both the right and left have tapped into anti-political sentiments to unseat the traditionally dominant parties in Western Europe and beyond. In fact, 2024 was the worst year for incumbents on record. In developed countries that held elections, every single governing party lost vote share.

The American Case

Modern U.S. history tells a decades-long story of how anti-politics takes root. In the late 1960s, the public grew distrustful and receded while political parties became more insular to protect themselves.

Sometimes called “the last innocent year,” 1964 was the high point of American institutional trust at 77%, per Gallup polling. Both the failed Vietnam War and corruption scandals at home — such as Watergate and the findings of the Church Committee on CIA abuses — deeply damaged public faith in the following years. By 1979, it had plummeted to 29%. 

The public responded to the diminishing prospects of politics by turning inward. The 1970s were the “Me Decade,” as journalist Tom Wolfe put it. Former hotbeds of student activism calmed. Relatively rare during the previous decade, self-help books started to fill the bestseller lists. Concepts like “burnout” appeared in psychological journals for the first time. As Christopher Lasch wrote of the period, a “therapeutic sensibility” was taking over America. No longer were Americans viewing politics as a place to actualize their dreams. 

Instead, they looked elsewhere. What was once political became personal. Sociologist Nina Eliasoph has documented how this transformation affected even the language of everyday people. In her field studies during the 1980s, she was surprised to find how often words like “doable” and “personal” overlapped with “non-political,” whereas “not doable” was associated with “away from home” or “political.” By the end of the 20th century, this passive sensibility was clear at the ballot box. In the 1996 presidential election, voter turnout dropped to a historic low.

This was not without reason. As the scandals of the 1970s unraveled, both the Republican and Democratic parties reorganized themselves away from the public, justifying this shift under the guise of stability. The public was deemed simply too volatile and emotional to decide politics now.

This gave rise to the so-called “invisible primary” or “money primary”: the primary before the primary, where a candidate is primed for the public by investors and insider allies. It was a turning point in how parties procured funds. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that election expenditures count as “free speech,” making dark campaign money legally permissible. Then in 1982, the Hunt Commission codified preselected superdelegates as part of the Democratic primary process, further gating party elites from the public.

As the Democrats restructured themselves, Republicans strategized around the rising number of non-voters. In 1977, they filibustered to irrelevance President Jimmy Carter’s bill to make voter registration easier. As Pat Buchanan, the future White House communications director for President Reagan, put it: The “busing of economic parasites and political illiterates” to the polls would mean the end of the insurgent New Right.

Consultants and pollsters instead became a leading group within the party apparatus, which now lacked strong civil society roots. According to political scientist Costas Panagopoulos, media mentions of political consultancy increased 13-fold from 1979 to 1985. The maintenance of the party cartel became an end in itself for those employed by it, and politics consequently became the art of maintaining this closed-off world.  

The result was the development of a “permanent campaign,” as political strategist Sidney Blumenthal famously put it in 1980. The ballooning costs of the permanent campaign were simply too high to allow for any outsiders. In many cases, being an incumbent was the ticket to virtually automatic victories. Once you entered the party system, you stayed. As a result, the U.S. has effectively become a gerontocracy.

Despite both political parties building decades-old moats around themselves, they are still under siege today. In the 21st century, longstanding distrust has hardened into a generalized opposition supercharged by the internet. As if awakened from dormancy, the once-passive public has made its power felt. Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump were victorious despite not being chosen by the invisible primary.

Yet contemporary anti-politics presents us with a glaring contradiction, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. While outsiders tap into the anti-establishment mood to win votes, they struggle to maintain legitimacy once they enter power themselves. This is because anti-politics today is rarely expressed as a positive program. 
Since there is no clear majority opinion driving it other than general cynicism, what we have instead is “unpopular populism.” And as is so often the case, electing a new government does not fundamentally redress the tension; it just briefly pauses it.

A General Opposition

More than half a century ago, American political theorist Robert Dahl speculated that the political future might be motivated by a new principle: “an opposition to the democratic leviathan itself.” To the average alienated citizen, the state would become “remote, distant, and impersonal.” Dahl, in many ways, was right.

Today’s political life is dominated by a general discontentment with representation itself. But this is closer to unveiling the true reality of politics than one might assume. 

One cannot be nostalgic about past eras of mass politics, as if they had been actually representative. On the contrary, those eras obscured the actual relationship between the state and the public. Back then, after all, powerful political machines relied on bosses in civil society organizations to churn out votes. 

This past setup was marginally more representative and sometimes even delivered results, but the American public rejected it in the 1970s precisely because it exposed itself as corrupt. The internet has now converted this longstanding cynicism into raw discontentment. The state’s naked self-interest is so clearly out in the open now, seen for what it is. 

Messy as it may be, what has been broken apart cannot be put back together. When anti-politics is the prevailing mood, the most relevant division becomes up versus down, insiders versus outsiders. What is most resented by people is being made invisible. 

Any successful future movement will have to position itself as both part of the public and prove it can deliver pro-social, material results. A healthier civil society has to be rebuilt from the bottom up. Despite lacking coherence, anti-politics is effectively the real movement: a symptom of a deep fissure that can no longer be ignored.