Why I'm Quitting Performative Politics

When politics becomes theater, people get hurt

If there is one thing that social media has changed more than anything else, it must be our relationship with politics and politicians. Remember the time when it was considered rude to discuss sex, money, and politics at dinner?

The reasoning behind that choice was that you could never be sure about what anyone thought about something, and you would not want to create awkward discussions or make anyone feel uncomfortable.

I don’t know about you, but today I find it almost impossible to go to dinner with people whose political leanings I’m unaware of: I know in painful detail what the vast majority of the people around me (not just my closest friends, but my acquaintances, my neighbors…) think not just in terms of general political affiliations, but on any given issue, any given day. And I am ashamed to admit that when I know there’s someone I disagree with on something I consider IMPORTANT, I make it a point to discuss that very topic with them. Recently, I have become aware that I have somehow grown to see conflict avoidance as synonymous with moral weakness.

I have recently had to come to terms with the fact that this kind of behavior is not conducive to a healthier democracy, so I’m trying to change it.

With the spread of social media, we have begun to consider our social media feeds as a way to certify our integrity. We carefully curated a daily exhibit of unrequested opinions because we wanted to signal virtue on the one hand and to belong on the other. It was us, the voters, who started this: politicians followed our lead and, in the quest to appear in tune with modern times, they started investing gargantuan amounts of money to expand their reach on social media, which brought more people to stream their political performances in an exhausting cycle that appears to be all but over.

But when politics becomes a performance, the stakes shift. We stop asking, “Is this working?” and start asking, “Does this look right?” And nowhere has this dynamic played out more dramatically - and more dangerously - than in conversations around gender.

Take the widespread adoption of pronouns in bios or email signatures. What began as a gesture of solidarity - normalizing gender diversity, making space for trans and nonbinary people - was quickly picked up as a kind of moral accessory. Something to wear when the cultural climate made it fashionable. Something to quietly discard when it no longer felt safe or profitable.

This is not to say that the practice itself was flawed. Quite the opposite: normalizing pronouns can be a powerful tool for inclusion. But when allyship becomes a posture instead of a practice, it creates a backlash that falls squarely on the shoulders of the people it was meant to support.

We’re seeing that backlash now. We see it in the rise of openly transphobic discourse dressed up as “free speech.” We see it in Substack's essays declaring “transgenderism is over,” as if people’s existence were a season of television. We see it in the retreat of public figures who once signaled support, now pulling back - not because they’ve reconsidered, but because the performance is no longer rewarded.

But here’s the thing: the alternative to performative hate is not performative allyship. The real alternative is deep, relational, often uncomfortable work - where listening matters more than signaling, where showing up matters more than being seen. Where protecting the dignity of a person matters more than protecting our ego’s need to be right 100% of the time.

This matters more than ever when it comes to the crisis facing boys and the future of gender equality. If we want to reimagine masculinity, we must move beyond the logic of performance, which is so intertwined with the most toxic interpretations of what “becoming a man” is supposed to mean.

Dominance is rooted in performance.

Dignity is rooted in presence.

The Democratic Party has reportedly spent $ 20 million to “understand male voters.” Still, the problem with this kind of half-hearted attempt is that it doesn’t tackle the root of the matter: Democrats are looking for a solution when they should be trying to understand what the problem is first. Turns out that listening is much harder than one may think.

There is a kind of performative feminism that has dominated mainstream progressive social media feeds over the past decade. A feminism that paid lip service to the mantra “the patriarchy is bad for everyone” but, in reality, operates within the zero-sum game framework, as pointed out wonderfully in this powerful essay by

Celeste Davis

. A feminism that centers slogans over substance, and treats male pain as either a threat or a punchline.

This kind of feminism may have started with good intentions, but it has too often traded empathy for moral high ground. It has built cultural capital by positioning itself against men, rather than working with them to dismantle the systems that harm us all.

Instead of asking how boys are socialized into emotional silence, we mock them for failing to express their feelings.
Instead of asking why so many men are isolated and anxious, we share viral posts about “fragile masculinity.”
Instead of exploring how patriarchy turns men into tools of economic productivity at the expense of their well-being, we assume that male privilege renders their struggles irrelevant.

In other words, as

Darci Flynn

put it:

We’re fighting patriarchy with patriarchal tools. We are fighting a losing battle as a result.

This performative stance may feel good in the moment - it offers the same seductive certainty that all performance does - but it is not building the world we need. In fact, it’s helping fuel the backlash we’re now living through. It has created a vacuum of meaning, empathy, and direction that reactionaries are more than happy to fill.

Real feminism - liberatory feminism - has always been about liberation for all. It’s about building a world in which women, men, and everyone beyond those binaries can be whole. And that work cannot happen if we continue to ignore the specific ways in which men are also harmed by the very structures we seek to dismantle.

The kind of work that is sorely needed isn’t glamorous at all. It doesn’t go viral. It rarely makes anyone feel morally superior. It requires us to hold space for someone else’s discomfort without rushing to resolve it. It demands curiosity in place of certainty and humility instead of posturing.

This isn’t the kind of work that gives you instant moral clarity. In fact, it will often leave you feeling messy and unsure. But that’s where real transformation lives—in the tension between what we know and what we’re still learning.

Performative politics, on the other hand, offers the illusion of certainty. It makes us feel 100% right, 100% of the time. It rewards performance over progress, certainty over sincerity. And as long as we stay trapped in that dynamic, no real progress will be possible—not on gender, not on race, not on climate, not on democracy itself.

We are seeing a chilling example in the streets of Los Angeles when the National Guard and ICE were deployed in what looked like the militarized climax of some dystopian reality show. People in crisis, pushed into invisibility by men in uniform while the nation watches - not horrified, but entertained. It was politics as a spectacle. It was the logic of performance taken to its most terrifying conclusion.

But here’s the truth we need to hold onto: if we, the voters, helped create this culture of performance, we can also dismantle it. We can choose a different kind of politics. One that values presence over performance. One that rewards the slow, unsexy work of building trust, shifting narratives, and healing divides.

Perhaps burning bridges with anyone who holds opinions different from ours isn’t just rude, it is also very bad for democracy. Perhaps being right isn’t always more important than being able to get through a dinner together.

I am committed to keep more opinions to myself, and to select more carefully the issues I take a public stance on.

I am committed to being a better listener, to stop acting as if expressing all my opinions as loud as I can will change the world.

I am committed to listen more to the person in front of me and to ask more questions to understand how they came to hold a specific opinion.

I am committed to save energy from online disagreements, and to use my energy for offline conversations - because a huge reality of online fights is that they leave us depleted and scared to connect in real life.

My hope is that, if we can stop treating politics like a stage, our politicians will stop being incentivized to act like clowns.

I will not deny that it is hard to see things that are painful, and feel there is nothing we can do about them. But that’s reality. The vast majority of us, individually, will never have the power to stop a conflict or to prevent an egomaniac to be elected President.

Let’s stop acting as if the weight of the world were on our shoulders. If we do, perhaps we could discover that there is plenty each of us can do for our neighbors, for our families, for a stranger that we stumble upon in the street. There is plenty we can do by checking our self-righteousness at the door and giving time and energy to the frustrating, tiring, and surprisingly rewarding task of getting to know people, and find ways to live well alongside them, even when they are not perfectly aligned with us, politically or otherwise.

The way we choose to stand next to each other matters more than what we post on Instagram.

We are not members of the audience.

We are participants in this game.

I am trying to stop performing, and start playing for real.

Even if it’s messy. Even if it’s quiet.

Especially then.

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