The Left Has a Hyperpolitics Problem

A photograph called Love (Hands in Hair) from the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans shows a young woman in red lipstick, eyes closed, a man’s hands on her head, in a nightclub. This image from 1989, which appears on the cover of the historian Anton Jäger’s new book, Hyperpolitics, captured a sort of beginning. The weight of history is over, and the music can sway. That world, Jäger suggests, is both still with us and long gone. The rich democracies—most of his examples come from Western Europe...