Why Do Politicians Still Love Their Abuser?

Time for politicians to abandon X

X used to be where politicians went to make news; they bypassed traditional media to try to control their own narrative. Now it is where they go to be eaten. Not in any noble, Roman way, no lions, no colosseum, just the beep-beep of notifications, a million little teeth gnawing away at whatever remained of your dedicated life in public service. Politicians are told this is “the conversation,” that this churning slurry of outrage and GIFs is the soul of democracy, and so they climb willingly into the machine, feet first, smiling for the cameras as the gears start to bite and turn your self-worth into a barely recognisable bloody morass.

For more than a decade, the story went like this: here, at last, is the magic hinge between ruler and ruled. You, President, Minister, backbencher, local election candidate, can now address your people directly, without the prissy interference of political editors or the tedium of stump speeches in draughty halls. Type what you want into the little box, and the whole world will tremble at your magnificence. The reality is otherwise quietly obscene. What actually exists is a sealed terrarium full of political operatives, journalists, anonymous psychos and a dwindling audience of obsessives with no sex lives, all screaming at the pixelated glass wall and mistaking the condensation for making history and that they have a giant part to play.

The first thing X does to a politician is instil fear in them. Not the palatable fear of losing an election or betraying a sacred principle, but the unholy dread of the quote-tweet. Every statement is made under the oscillating blade of being taken out of context by someone with a cartoon frog avatar that declares their biases in their bio for the whole world to be aghast at. Each time a politician considers saying something real about migration, or housing, or a war, a spectral focus-group of X accounts materialises in their head, shrieking slurs and death threats. So politicians round the edges off their thoughts. They do not name things that should be named. Whole subjects fall away into silence because the price of naming them is hundreds of replies discussing their body, their race, their children, their supposed crimes against some imagined people. The public sphere contracts to whatever can be safely said in front of a mob that hates you and your unborn children and their unborn children.

Of course, there is the other fear: not of saying too much, but of saying the wrong nothing. X is a gigantic lottery in which every post is a ticket, and one of those tickets is your funeral. A bad joke, a mis-click, some half-remembered meme shared after midnight: pulled out of the stream and nailed to the wall, it becomes the definitive artefact of your existence. There are politicians whose entire careers have been boiled down to one screenshot. They are promissory notes for eternal damnation long after the original sin has been deleted. Years of committee work, constituency clinics, and tedious local meetings dissolve into a single half-sentence about a sandwich or a football team or a war. The intelligent political animal draws the appropriate conclusion: speak in pre-chewed sentences, never be interesting, never be human, and perhaps the machine will not notice you.

But the X machine only really sees extremes. It is built to distribute all manner of weirdness, to lift the most hysterical, fact-resistant, emotionally diseased fragments to the top where they can be admired or reviled. So our elected representatives, who are supposedly there to deliberate and compromise, learn to start communicating in something akin to primal screams. Nuance dies. You do not say, “This is a complex issue with competing goods and harms,” because that sentence will sink to the bottom like a stone. Instead, you tell your followers that the other side wants to abolish reality, legalise murder, and cannibalise your loved ones. You pose at the rubble of politics with a thumbs-up. You learn that outrage is the only reliable accelerant, and you douse yourself in it every morning.

Meanwhile, something much weirder slouches onto the screen. It is no longer clear that the politician is even competing with other human beings. Around them swarm botnets and burner accounts and AI-generated faces, all participating in the same ritual of denunciation. Fake speeches circulate that they never gave. Synthetic videos show them committing crimes. Their “statement” on some breaking scandal appears from an impersonator account and is believed by more people than will ever see the correction. In this environment, words detach from speakers altogether; the politician is reduced to a flickering image that others can puppet and deface. They become a kind of public-domain character in a collaborative hate-fiction. We have all seen what happens to those who express anything more complex than a tribal shriek on Gaza or gender. This isn’t communication; it’s a form of digital self-immolation, where the flame is lit the moment you hit ‘post’.

And presiding over this is the proprietor, a bored Broligarch with delusions of being a philosopher-king, a man who seems to believe he is the protagonist of history. At any point, he can decide that certain views will be quietly buried and others catapulted onto millions of screens. He can label you “state propaganda” while at the same time selling advertising space to defence contractors. He can flood your mentions with paying fans of his personal ideology. The great promise was that X would peel away the intermediaries between the powerful and everyone else; instead, it has revealed the most vulgar intermediary of all, a single moody landlord who rents out slivers of attention at his pleasure. He sells X to us as a digital Agora, a silicon polis where togas of light would be woven from pure, unfiltered discourse. What a grim joke. X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is less a town square than a bot-infested septic tank.

So why are they still there, these Ministers, Mayors, Senators and local councillors, humbly queueing for their daily flogging? The honest answer is that they are addicted to a world that hates them. X gives them the illusion that politics is happening on their phone, that history is written in the cadence of the feed. To leave would feel like stepping out of the universe. But the real world is still stubbornly elsewhere: in housing, food banks, accident and emergency wards, parliaments, pubs. The more our representatives burrow into the glowing rectangle, the less they exist in the places where their decisions are actually made.

It would be a small act of sanity for a politician to step back: to treat X not as an oracle or a battlefield, but as a malfunctioning noticeboard at the end of the world. Announce things, if you must. Post boring links. Refuse the invitation to perform your soul for the benefit of a million strangers, the majority of whom are not even real people. The idea that you ‘have to be there’ is the last gasp of a dying orthodoxy. The smart move isn’t a principled deletion, but a profound and weary demotion. Because the longer politics plays out on this stage, the more it comes to resemble the platform itself: jittery, cruel, permanently hysterical, incapable of nuance, allergic to seriousness, and convinced that the great questions of our time can be distilled into 280 characters and a ratio.

To step back from X is not an admission of defeat; it is a quiet, almost heretical act of sanity. It is a statement that the real work of democracy, the dull, the difficult, the human frailty, happens elsewhere. It happens everywhere, in fact, but there.