Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 80 the year she transformed from public figure to pop-culture icon.
It was 2013, Ginsburg had issued a scathing dissent in the Shelby County v. Holder voting rights case, and an admiring New York University law student created the Notorious RBG Tumblr feed. The blog was sprinkled with pictures of the justice in a crown like Biggie Smalls’, along with cheeky lyrics from R&B songs—drawing parallels, years before “Hamilton,” between the subversive spirit of hip-hop and the power of American institutions.
Ginsburg had been a major figure in American jurisprudence for decades, a known quantity with much less overt swagger than the Alexander Hamilton in the play. In her bearing and her writing, she was deliberative, quiet, understated, trusting in the process and the system. This new character, Notorious RBG, had the same intelligence and drive—the blog was deeply respectful and often intellectual, quoting passages from Ginsburg’s court opinions—but she was also a badass and, better, a meme. The piled-up images, musical tributes, and declarations of love suggested that Ginsburg, diminutive and frail, was also fierce, not-to-be-messed-with and fun. Recently, the blog’s header was a cartoon of the justice riding a unicorn over a rainbow.
If Ginsburg was bemused, at first, by the Tumblr and the frenzy it created, it didn’t take her long to embrace it. In an event at the 92nd St. Y in New York in 2014, she told Nina Totenberg that she kept a collection of “Notorious RBG” t-shirts and gave them out as gifts. Four years later, in a conversation with Totenberg at Sundance, she praised Kate McKinnon’s in-the-same-spirit SNL impression and said she wouldn’t mind saying “Gins-burn!” to her colleagues once in awhile. In the opening scenes of the 2018 documentary “RBG,” she did sit-ups and planks with a personal trainer, wearing a t-shirt that says “Super Diva.” (Technically, it was an opera reference. But still.)
The notion of this tiny octogenarian, showing off not just undiminished mental power but also increasing physical strength, was a telling thrill. “The Notorious RBG” foreshadowed an evolving approach to age in politics—a way of not just appreciating the wisdom that comes with experience, but of viewing age itself, and the staying power it conveys, as actually cool. But it also created a risk.
The original Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a badass in historical terms—a groundbreaker, a game changer—but sassy comebacks and proud flexing weren’t her style. In the documentary “RBG,” a family friend refers to her as “recessive,” especially in contrast to her gregarious husband, Marty. Even the cases Ginsburg chose, as an attorney, were sometimes deliberately unflashy. She believed in consensus and incrementalism. She gravitated toward discrimination cases with men as the plaintiffs, in order to make the deepest point about equal treatment of the sexes and be persuasive to mostly male panels of judges. And her close friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia, her ideological opposite, showed how much she valued collegiality, and how much she was able to separate her personal life from her occupational passions.
When she ascended to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg was well aware of her public presence as the second woman ever on the Court, and of the symbolism inherent in her bearing. She used her jabots, the decorative collars that adorned her judicial robes, as a kind of subtle semaphore. One was for majority opinions, another for dissents. Much was made when she wore a spiky metal necklace for her first official court portrait with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. And as Supreme Court-watchers like Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick have noted, the Notorious RBG Tumblr picked up on a change in Ginsburg’s tone in the middle of her tenure on the court, as she started to read dissents out loud and use language that felt more pointed and direct.
The RBG frenzy also raised Ginsburg’s profile in a different way, and as the merchandise piled up—tattoos, dolls, Halloween costumes, children’s books—it seemed to unleash a new version of Ginsburg’s public persona itself. This newfound frankness sometimes got the real Ginsburg into trouble. In 2016, when NFL player Colin Kaepernick first began to take a knee during the national anthem, Ginsburg told Katie Couric that the act was “dumb and disrespectful;” even the Notorious RGB Tumblr gently called her out, and Ginsburg soon apologized. Ginsburg was even more dismissive of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, in a way that many found extreme for a Supreme Court justice. Again, she apologized for wading into politics. Still, the damage was done; the new RBG was seen by some as less professionally unassailable, more likely to be biased.
As tricky as it was becoming for the real Ginsburg to manage, this fierce new persona had staying power, and it was a kind of prototype for a broader phenomenon. The Notorious RBG memes prefaced a cultural shift, particularly in politics, where age would come to be seen as not just the absence of an obstacle, but an asset. Being older and energetic proved that you were a survivor, battle-scarred and tested, ready for the next fight.
These days, America embraces youth culture as much as it ever did—witness the hubbub over the future of TikTok and the interest in successive generations of Kardashians. But at the highest levels of government and politics, old is in. Despite next-generation figures like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg, the past few election cycles have seen no broad groundswell for a changing of the guard. In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan seemed shockingly ancient at 69. In 2020, both presidential candidates are considerably older, 74 and 77. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 80, and the subject of memes of her own.
But that should give us some pause ahead of an election with two septuagenarians facing off. Some have wondered, over the years, whether Ginsburg’s embrace of her newfound badassery gave her an outsized confidence in her own invincibility. As many have noted, she could have retired during the Obama administration, eliminating the risk that she would need to be replaced by a Republican president. But Ginsburg’s seeming agelessness—or, perhaps, the increased power that came with her age—felt like a defense against the clock. And her new status as an icon, a symbol of strength and achievement for little girls across the country, might have persuaded her to stay on the Court for another year, and then another, and another.
Her biggest advocates consistently reassured the RBG-loving masses that their hero was, indeed, unstoppable. When Ginsburg was hospitalized after a fall in 2018, Irin Carmon—who, with Shana Knizhik, co-wrote a book based on the Notorious RBG Tumblr—warned against panic in The Cut. Carmon noted Ginsburg’s bouts with cancer, her workout regimen, her history of water skiing and whitewater rafting. “I am not RBG’s doctor, but I am one of her biographers, here to testify to her resilience,” Carmon wrote. That time, Ginsburg did, indeed, bounce back.
And so it went for a very long time, to the point that every subsequent setback felt more like a blip than a danger sign. The Notorious RBG, after all, had been elevated to a kind of superhuman status, existing outside time, in a realm of rainbows and unicorns, wishful thinking and admiration. The real Ruth Bader Ginsburg was admirable, too. But she was human, after all.
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