Hysterics & Hashtags

“A Birdcage” by Gwen John (1876-1939)

It’s a familiar rhetorical maneuver in American politics to suggest the lives and dreams of those pushed to its fringes are far removed from those perceived as its center. Take, for example, a recent profile by Tim Alberta in The Atlantic called “The Advice Elissa Slotkin Didn’t Take.” The piece takes a familiar (some might say trite and condescending) tone when it positions Slotkin, selected to give the official Democratic response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union on Tuesday, as a bold truthteller above the “abstract, ideologically charged activism that was hopelessly detached from kitchen-table concerns.”

As Slotkin tells Alberta from a white, working-class Michigan district that she won and Kamala Harris lost in 2024:

“There are a lot of people, including in this town, who will never scream on the internet, who will never go to a rally, who will never get involved in partisan politics, but just want their government to run. I’m speaking to them—not to just the hardcore base of the party. And if they wanted someone to speak to the hardcore base of the party, they picked the wrong gal.”

Slotkin—and, it should be said, Alberta—hoped to put forward a different tone than the one that (at least in the rear view) seemed to define the Democratic Party under Trump 1.0. You know—all the “hysteria and hashtags” or “land acknowledgments and pronoun policing and intersectionality initiatives” and whatnot. Never mind that literal “pronoun policing” was one of Donald Trump’s first priorities upon returning to office—banning government workers from providing their own pronouns, asking for someone else’s pronouns, and even policing what trans people call ourselves on documents. And disregard that Democrats performed quite well when the brand of politics they’re dismissing was most visible in 2020, an election Democrats won. These issues were clearly, in Alberta’s mind at least, being pushed by a faceless, feminine, and decidedly online mob.

The people who made up this mob clearly have nothing in common with the people who should, as Alberta’s piece argues, be at the center of our politics. People like the denizens of towns like Wyandotte, Michigan, where Alberta finds “bait shops and dive bars and white dudes with tattoos on their neck,” a place Alberta readily admits is “racially homogenous” and potentially winnable for Democrats like Slotkin (a bet Harris took and lost). In doing so, you break off any solidarity those Michiganders and their “kitchen-table concerns” might feel towards a group like, say, transgender people even though they are more likely to live in poverty, to be unemployed, to be homeless, to lack a college education, to suffer from substance use, to experience violence, and to die an early death than the median American. They are also overrepresented in low-wage, service-sector jobs (like working at a bait shop or dive bar) and underrepresented in creative, knowledge-economy jobs (like writing for The Atlantic). Instead, they are defined as the rabble, the hoarde, a cloud of purple-haired locusts who hate winning elections and love posting on the internet.

Importantly, however, this maneuver deployed by Alberta is but one act of a cycle I’ve watched played out over and over between people with institutional power and those reduced to online platforms.

Let’s imagine, just for a second, that you have institutional power. Specifically, let’s imagine you have influence and sway from within a media company, corporation, or political party. Now let’s imagine a group without that power is critical of how you are wielding your power or concerned that you are doing so without due consideration of its impact on their lives. But along with your institutional power, you have status—wealth, relationships, and means of exerting influence from within and perhaps even beyond the institution itself. When others challenge your credibility, that prestige acts as an immune system against their calls for accountability. You can define the terms of the debate—they cannot. You can define the language of the debate—they cannot. You can reduce them in the public eye to a formless cloud of irrational dissent online—they can only make the cloud grow louder and, thus, less intelligible.

This kicks off a cycle where your status and their lack of it becomes self-evident. Why should you have to listen to this mob and their shouting, these nonbinary campus activists, these uncompromising ideologues, these brainrotted online trolls? You, in contrast, are so much more intelligible and rational, gifted as you are with the ability to make a living off rhetoric. They do not just appear to you as irrational because you only encounter them through Twitter—they are irrational and thus are only heard on Twitter. QED.

Take me, for example. My criticisms or complaints of people like Slotkin or Alberta will only really be heard if I air them out on social media platforms where, regardless of how carefully I word them or how grounded in the material they are, can simply be shoved aside as more noise that those with institutional power can ignore. In fact, as so much post-election punditry suggests, anyone with power is not only free to ignore that noise but compelled to do so lest they grant political capital to someone they imagine has nothing in common with the locals of Wyandotte, Michigan.

In truth, however, it’s all nothing but a bunch of noise. If you are already surrounded by prestige and wealth and status, then inciting the outrage of people who lack those things means you’re really just going to have to wait out their online outrage or, at worst, log off. At that point, there might even be benefits to inciting these people anger, particularly if you’re actual audience is people who already wish they didn’t have to be concerned with the feminine, the queer, the nonwhite. They might see you as a heterodox thinker, a brave truthteller, a martyr for the cause even though you never risked sacrificing anything but your mentions.

I recently became enamored with the metaphor “kettling” to describe how social movements have their energies channelled into venues that people with power find more tolerable and containable. The phrase is familiar to anyone who has taken part in street-level direct action when police use teargas or even helicopters to push (or “kettle”) protesters into a particular area of a city away from where their protest may have had an impact. The kettle need not end the protest altogether to limit the marchers’ effectiveness—it simply needs to let them exercise their demons somewhere else lest it be allowed to cause disruption or amass influence. As a metaphor, radicals may be pushed towards “the art kettle,” for example, limiting their material demands to exercises in symbolism or representation. A mass of unorganized workers in danger of forming a union may instead be “kettled” towards affinity groups, sensitivity workshops, or other management-approved venues. It’s a strategy not of eradication but containment.

The same could be said of social media, where I often find myself being guided by the incentives of platforms towards conflict, alarmism, and frivolity—nobody-is-talking-about-this, “endlessly critiquing power,” or otherwise a bunch of bullshit that doesn’t matter. It’s not that anyone who isn't on a barricade is wasting their time, necessarily, but it would be silly to suggest the medium exerts no influence over the message, and it’s good to be cognizant of when you are the user and when you are the tool.

To that end, I’ve begun to recognize moments when my outrage, particularly channeled online, is valuable to people opposed to my legal and social equality. Not only because anger—and its cousins bitterness, resentment, and jealousy—is inherently self-destructive, but also because, as a transgender woman and dreaded “trans activist,” I am already coded to many as irrational. Therefore, anyone who becomes the target of my ire must, in contrast, be rational. Because my anger lacks status, whatever I’m angry at must have it. This is particularly valuable to people within political and media institutions at a time when most people distrust those institutions—by inviting the outrage of people who can do nothing more than post about it, they can surround themselves in the aesthetic of resistance while advancing the status quo.