One of the great tricks of modern power is that it does not always silence grievance. Sometimes it amplifies it.

That sounds strange at first. We are used to thinking that powerful institutions are afraid of people naming injustice. But in our current moment, many institutions are perfectly comfortable with certain kinds of grievance. Corporations will speak the language of inclusion. Universities will create whole departments around identity recognition. Media companies will platform endless conflict between men and women, Black men and Black women, straight people and gay people, cis people and trans people, immigrants and native-born citizens. Social media will reward outrage with attention, visibility, and status.

But the question is not simply whether grievance is being expressed. The deeper question is: where is that grievance being aimed?

This is where I think many forms of contemporary “woke” politics become politically weak. The problem is not that every grievance is fake. Racism is real. Sexism is real. Homophobia is real. Class exploitation is real. People do harm each other across lines of race, sex, gender, sexuality, religion, and nationality. None of that should be denied.

The problem is that grievance can be redirected away from real centers of power and toward ordinary people who are themselves trapped inside the same system.

In other words, people are trained to look sideways instead of upward.

Men are told women are the enemy. Women are told men are the enemy. Black men and Black women are encouraged to blame one another for the collapse of community. Straight people and gay people are positioned as rival moral tribes. Workers are taught to resent immigrants instead of employers. Poor people are encouraged to resent slightly less poor people. Everybody is given someone nearby to blame.

Meanwhile, the institutions that actually organize life remain largely untouched.

Banks still control debt. Corporations still control labor. Landlords still control housing. Tech platforms still control speech and visibility. Universities still control credentials. Media companies still control narratives. Political parties still control the boundaries of acceptable debate. The criminal justice system still controls bodies. The health-care system still extracts wealth from suffering. And most people, regardless of identity, still have very little control over the conditions of their lives.

This is what I call horizontalized domination.

Vertical power comes from above: capital, law, institutions, ownership, management, policing, bureaucracy, media, and the state. Horizontal conflict happens among people who are being governed by those structures. When people who should be analyzing power instead spend all their energy accusing one another, domination has been successfully redirected.

This is why the modern grievance economy is so useful to the system. It gives people moral language without giving them power. It gives them enemies without giving them strategy. It gives them visibility without giving them organization. It gives them recognition without giving them liberation.

And social media intensifies the whole thing.

Social media turns political pain into personal performance. It encourages people to narrate their wounds, name their enemies, gather their tribe, and perform moral certainty in public. But it rarely teaches discipline, coalition, sacrifice, or institution-building. The platform does not care whether people become free. It cares whether they stay engaged.

So every day we watch the same cycle repeat itself: someone names an injury, someone else rejects it, another group responds with counter-injury, the discourse explodes, everybody chooses sides, and the deeper structure remains intact. The machine feeds on disagreement.

This does not mean we should stop talking about identity. That would be foolish. Identity is one of the ways power marks people, disciplines people, and sorts people into different social positions. But identity cannot be the whole of politics. Recognition cannot be the same thing as emancipation. Being seen by the system is not the same as being free from it.

In fact, sometimes the system is happy to see you, as long as seeing you does not require surrendering power.

That is the trap.

A corporation can celebrate diversity while underpaying workers. A university can speak the language of inclusion while burying students in debt. A politician can use the language of justice while serving donors. A media company can elevate marginalized voices while profiting from division. A platform can amplify “radical” language while monetizing the conflict it produces.

Power is not afraid of every kind of radical language. Sometimes radical language becomes a costume worn by the existing order.

The real danger to power is not grievance by itself. The real danger is solidarity. The real danger is people recognizing that their injuries are different, but the architecture producing those injuries may be shared. The real danger is men and women, Black and white, straight and gay, workers and the unemployed, the educated and the excluded, refusing to let the system turn them into permanent enemies.

That does not require pretending everyone suffers equally. They do not. It does not require ignoring real harms between groups. Those harms exist. But it does require asking a deeper question:

Who benefits when we cannot stop fighting each other?

That question changes the whole conversation.

Because if every group is trained to see every other group as the primary threat, then no durable political community can form. No coalition can survive. No serious challenge to power can develop. People become experts in accusation but amateurs in strategy. They know how to name harm, but not how to build institutions. They know how to perform outrage, but not how to govern, protect, organize, or transform.

That is why grievance politics, in its current form, often functions less like liberation and more like management. It manages anger. It manages guilt. It manages resentment. It manages symbolic inclusion. But it does not necessarily redistribute power.

The point is not to abandon justice. The point is to stop confusing justice with endless interpersonal war.

A serious politics must be able to say two things at once: yes, people harm each other across identity lines; and yes, the most powerful forces shaping our lives are often above us, not beside us.

Until we understand that, we will keep mistaking the person next to us for the power over us.

And that is exactly how the machine survives.