Virtue Signalling

The Left’s Donald Trump Syndrome Is Worse Than The Man Himself

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Donald Trump - Muslims - Islamophobia

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Donald Trump’s derisive comments about London and his proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States are idiotic and hugely illiberal. But the self-righteous backlash from parts of the Left is just as bad

American politicians – especially wannabe presidential candidates – insult London at their peril.

Mitt Romney found that out the hard way back in 2012, after his off-the-cuff comments about the London Olympic Games preparations earned the ire of the British public and a personal rebuke from David Cameron.

But current Republican presidential candidate (and, depressingly, frontrunner) Donald Trump managed to make Mitt Romney’s gaffe-prone diplomacy look like a veritable charm offensive with a two-pronged effort to capture the news cycle which saw Trump first suggest that the US implement a complete ban on Muslims entering the country, and then insult America’s closest ally by suggesting that whole swathes of London are so full of Islamist extremists that the police do not enter them for fear of their lives.

From the New York Times:

Donald J. Trump called on Monday for the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on” after the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., an extraordinary escalation of rhetoric aimed at voters’ fears about members of the Islamic faith.

A prohibition of Muslims – an unprecedented proposal by a leading American presidential candidate, and an idea more typically associated with hate groups – reflects a progression of mistrust that is rooted in ideology as much as politics.

Mr. Trump, who in September declared “I love the Muslims,” turned sharply against them after the Paris terrorist attacks, calling for a database to track Muslims in America and repeating discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims celebrated in New Jersey on 9/11. His poll numbers rose largely as a result, until a setback in Iowa on Monday morning. Hours later Mr. Trump called for the ban, fitting his pattern of making stunning comments when his lead in the Republican presidential field appears in jeopardy.

And the Guardian:

In a bid to justify his controversial comments that Muslims should be barred from entering the US, Trump had said parts of London and Paris were so “radicalised” – seemingly a reference to Islamist extremism being rife – that police officers were scared.

“Paris is no longer the safe city it was. They have sections in Paris that are radicalised, where the police refuse to go there. They’re petrified. The police refuse to go in there,” he told MSNBC, refusing to name specific neighbourhoods in the city.

He added: “We have places in London and other places that are so radicalised that the police are afraid for their own lives. We have to be very smart and very vigilant.”

It really isn’t necessary to counter either Donald Trump’s back-of-a-napkin immigration policy, his supremely un-American idea for a religious test in order to enter the United States or his uninformed comments about the city which some years ago overtook New York and Paris as the world capital for finance and tourism respectively. We’ll take it as a given that every thinking person can recognise these comments as the unfiltered bilge that they are.

Of far more concern are the growing hordes of MPs, commentators and members of the public calling for Donald Trump to be banned from ever entering the UK on the grounds of “hate speech”.

The inevitable online petition is already circulating and picking up names, reports the Huffington Post:

An online petition calls on U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May to bar the Republican presidential frontrunner from entering the country for allegedly violating the nation’s hate-speech laws. 

If it receives 100,000 signatures, the petition could be taken up for debate in the House of Commons, according to The Independent. 

The petition launched by Scottish resident and longtime Trump critic Suzanne Kelly blasts Trump for “unrepentant hate speech and unacceptable behavior” that “foments racial, religious and nationalistic intolerance which should not be welcome in the U.K.”

While Sunder Katwala sets out the illiberal case over at British Future:

It is important that the UK Government makes very clear that this extreme view is rejected and repudiated in the strongest possible terms.

The UK Home Office has set out clear guidelines which have led to the exclusion of preachers of hate from the UK if their presence here would not be conducive to the public good. Theresa May has excluded extreme Islamists on these grounds, and also kept out those who have fanned extreme anti-Muslim prejudice, such as the bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. Trump’s statements are more extreme than theirs.

Unless and until Trump were to retract these highly prejudiced comments, there is a good case for making clear that he would be refused entry to the UK by the Home Secretary.

No. It is only “important” that the UK government does anything at all about this wretched circus act if you take the view that it is the proper role of government to be a watchful, overprotective parent who oversees everything that we do, say or hear, supposedly for our own good.

It’s only “important” if you take such a dim view of the intelligence of the British people that you believe – like a Victorian prude – that the health and morals of the nation are somehow at stake, and that general public might be inspired to commit racist or Islamophobic deeds either at the mere sound of Trump’s words or at the sight of his ridiculous hairdo.

Such a view is as nonsensical as it is insulting. Why on earth should the UK government care what a reality TV star turned presidential candidate says, and why can’t the British people be trusted to hear what he has to say and judge the merits (or the idiocy) for themselves? Besides, either Trump’s candidacy remains a complete joke, in which case illiberal UK government censorship would be a massive overreaction, or he is a viable contender – in which case the UK needs to remain neutral while our closest ally chooses their next leader.

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Donald Trump didn’t cover himself in any glory with his latest comments on Islam and London. But who expected anything more of him? For all his natural gift as a TV personality, Trump is a blowhard, anti-intellectual populist of the worst sort – a man who is fundamentally incurious but convinced that he has the right answer for everything (usually involving “winning” a trade war with China).

And to be sure, Trump’s latest remarks disqualify him as a serious candidate for the presidency, if the ten previous outrage-baiting comments had not already done so. In many ways, this is Trump’s “choosing Sarah Palin” moment – the action which finally doomed his candidacy, much like John McCain’s desperate and opportunistic pick for a vice presidential candidate back in 2008.

But the Left supposedly hold themselves to a higher standard. And yet in response to Trump’s inflammatory words we have seen such a parade of ostentatious outrage and cheap virtue-signalling that one could almost be forgiven for forgetting that the Left are in no small part responsible for the rise of Trump in the first place, as Douglas Murray devastatingly explains in The Spectator:

When the political left refuses to identify where Islamic terrorism comes from, what drives it or what it can even be called, it leaves the ground wholly open for anyone else to do or say anything they want.  Far from being blunt tools or broad brushstrokes, referring to ‘Islamic extremism’ or ‘Islamism’ makes an obvious and conscious effort to put down a delineating line between non-extreme Muslims and the extremists from their faith.  Yet many Muslim organisations, among others, reject this.

[..] But what people seem slow to realise is that suppressing legitimate concerns and decent discussion inevitably leads to people addressing the same things indecently.  We can thank the American left for the creation of Donald Trump and we can thank them for his comments last night.  For years the left made the cost of entering this discussion too high, so too few people were left willing to discuss the finer points of immigration, asylum or counter-terrorism policy and eventually the only release valve for peoples’ legitimate concerns is someone saying – wrongly in my view – ‘keep them all out.’

Yes, of course Donald Trump’s comments are reprehensible. But the answer is not to parade our outrage on social media, as though engaging in a competition to be more publicly offended by Trump’s words is a meaningful substitute for real activism. And nor is the answer to ban Donald Trump from coming to these shores, thus denying Boris Johnson and thousands of eager Londoners the opportunity to prove him wrong about our city – and Trump himself from receiving this much needed education.

Outrage on Twitter is nothing more than empty virtue-signalling, whilst indignant calls for Trump to be banned from entering the UK are every bit as illiberal as Trump’s own proposal to set a religious test for entry into the United States.

Donald Trump’s opponents believe that they are better than the business mogul, reality TV star and presidential candidate. If so – if they are all simply better, more enlightened people, a belief they make little effort to hide – they have a funny way of showing it.

Donald Trump - Make America Great Again

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Mao-Quoting IRA Apologist Calls UKIP An ‘Evil Force In Society’

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

John McDonnell - UKIP - An evil force in our society.jpg

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Labour’s shadow chancellor has all the time in the world for IRA terrorists, and only praise for their murderous actions. But John McDonnell thinks that UKIP voters and people who believe in national sovereignty are “evil”

While speaking at a Momentum campaign dinner this weekend, John McDonnell took a break from quoting Mao Tse-Tung and spoke instead about his view of UKIP:

But actually, winning for Labour is important but beating Ukip is just as important as well.

We can not allow what I think is an evil force within our society – that divides society often on the basis of race, often on the basis on some of the crudest policies that you can imagine any political party advocating. We cannot allow them to get any form  of toehold within our political system and that’s why it’s about defeating them but more importantly, defeating them — a clear contrast in terms of a sincere, local committed socialist candidate.

This, of course, is in the context of Labour’s loosening hold on the constituency of Oldham, where UKIP may overturn the 14,000+ majority won by the late Michael Meacher back in May.

And it’s good to know exactly what the Labour leadership thinks of those British people who believe in democracy, national sovereignty and self-determination – people who dare to be quietly patriotic instead of angrily insisting that there is any moral equivalence between Britain and the forces of terrorism, religious fundamentalism and communist dictatorship.

But of course we already knew what the Labour leadership thinks of those people. Since the beginning of Ed Miliband’s vacillating, sanctimonious leadership of the Labour Party back in 2010, the Labour Party has strutted around as though they are the sole custodians of the nation’s conscience and morals, the only ones with a soul – while the rest of us are evil Tory Scum who delight in persecuting the poor and the sick.

Even an unprecedented rejection at the ballot box in May and a leadership election did nothing to shake the confidence of the party base that they were enlightened and virtuous souls voting for society, while the rest of us were greedy, avaricious racists, voting for our wallets and a return to the 1920s. This may be the marching song of the Corbynites, but it is a self-flattering myth believed by other more moderate factions of the Labour Party, too.

As it goes with domestic policy, so it is with international affairs and Britain’s place in the world. The slavishly pro-EU stance of the Labour and the British Left are portrayed as the only “enlightened” or “moral” opinion to hold, while anyone who questions whether Britain should continue to participate in a tightening supra-national political union that nobody wanted or voted for is somehow reactionary or old-fashioned.

And that’s before we even mention immigration. The Labour Party are at their thuggish worst when they seek to smear anyone who questions the wisdom of unlimited intra-EU immigration as a bigot or racist. And John McDonnell proves that he is more than willing to do this, when he speaks about the danger of a political party which “divides society often on the basis of race”.

The irony, of course, is that whatever the other rights or wrongs of UKIP’s immigration policy, theirs is inarguably the least racist policy of all the main political parties, including Labour. The Labour Party, together with all others, are fully wedded to Britain’s continued membership of the European Union and the continued free movement of people within that union. Which is lovely for hard-working southern and eastern Europeans with no qualifications, who out-compete unqualified Brits in the labour market, but less so for highly skilled Indian, Pakistani, Chinese or Brazilian workers who may have a huge amount to contribute to our economy but face significant obstacles to working and settling here.

The Labour Party has no response to this fundamental truth. They know that their fixation on continued British membership of the European Union promotes racial discrimination against non-Europeans when it comes to immigration policy, as well as dooming underqualified Brits to a life of minimum wage drudgery. But the socialist, internationalist pipe dream of European government trumps real concern for working people every single day. So they assuage their guilty consciences by ostentatiously pretending to be great anti-racism campaigners, and accusing everybody who sees through their cheap, tawdry tricks of being tantamount to a white supremacist.

It’s cheap and it’s pathetic, and it’s being pimped out by a despicable Labour shadow chancellor who praised the use of terrorism – the bomb and the bullet – against innocent British citizens.

Six months after a general election at a time of Conservative government missteps and scandals, and Labour are struggling to defend a 14,000 seat majority in the safest of safe seats. Those votes are bleeding away in no small part to UKIP, who are convincing many wavering Labour voters that Nigel Farage’s party is now better placed to defend their interests than a Labour Party which has been captured first by substance-free Milibandism and then by Islingtonian, Jeremy Corbyn-style moral hectors.

And Labour’s response? The same response they always give when they are backed into a tight spot – shroud themselves in the white robes of virtue and scream “racism!” at anyone who points out just how morally and intellectually bankrupt they really are.

A humiliating UKIP victory in Oldham – and the banishment of John McDonnell back to the swamps of vile far-left obscurity where he belongs – cannot come soon enough.

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Yoga Banned: Cultural Appropriation Zealots Are Creating A New Apartheid

Samuel Hooper13 Comments

Cultural Appropriation - Can I Wear A Bindi

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Today’s virtue-signalling, totalitarian student activists will stop at nothing to let everyone know just how enlightened and considerate they think they are, and how backward and oppressive they consider the rest of us to be

If you haven’t heard the term “cultural appropriation” before, you can expect to hear it a lot over the next few years. And if you have the misfortune of living anywhere near a university campus, you may even hear it shouted in your face by a raucous student protester, high on their own self-importance.

In fact, even if you’re not committing the modern day sin of cultural appropriation right now, you are almost certainly guilty of doing it at some point over the past twenty-four hours. Go and do your penance now. I’ll wait.

Cultural appropriation is the latest verbal weapon used by virtue-signalling lefty student activists – snivelling Millennial egotists who arrived at university only to find the worst oppression and discrimination already vanquished by previous generations, and who are now desperately casting around for a new cause to justify their Chinese-manufactured Che Guevara t-shirts.

Let’s put it like this: are you a white person who likes rap music, or who (heaven forfend) listens to music by white rappers from Eminem to Iggy Azelea? Then you’re a white supremacist cultural appropriator. By appreciating or assimilating something from outside of your own ethnic community, you have plundered the culture of your downtrodden minority friends and neighbours, making light of their most sacred and noble traditions for your own carefree amusement. Didn’t realise that’s what you were doing? Doesn’t matter, you’re still guilty.

Or maybe you really fell in love with Thai cuisine when you were on that round-the-world trip, and now you love to cook Thai-inspired meals at home, with your non-Thai hands, in your non-Thai kitchen, for your non-Thai friends. That’s cultural appropriation too. Shame on you. If you are a white American you should subsist entirely on cheeseburgers, barbecue and other culturally appropriate fare. God help you if you’re a Cockney but not mad for jellied eels.

Stay away from that lasagne if you’re from Idaho or Utah – can’t you see how eating pasta belittles and marginalises Italian Americans? And as for ordering Kung Pao chicken from your favourite Chinese takeout, why don’t you just start reading aloud from Mein Kampf in the town square, you nasty little fascist? Clearly you have no feeling for the mental safety of Asian Americans, who might feel mocked and excluded by your thoughtless foodcrime.

You get the idea. Before doing anything, first get out your Hierarchy of Privilege and remind yourself exactly where you fit on the Spectrum of Oppression. White and male? Tough luck, you can sample only from those other white, male cultural pursuits. Black, disabled and of undefined gender and sexuality? Then the world is your oyster – at least in the surreal world of academia.

Cultural Appropriation - Fourth Wave Feminism.jpg

 

And now the Stepford Students are coming to take away your Yoga classes, because chances are you aren’t from India – and therefore you are guilty of the cultural appropriation of Indian culture.

From Brendan O’Neill’s weary report in The Spectator:

Just when you thought uptight, fun-dodging, thought-policing millennials couldn’t get any worse, they go and brand yoga as racist. Apparently, when white people bend themselves bonkers while humming or thinking happy-clappy thoughts, they’re not only being self-punishing saps: they are also ‘culturally appropriating’ a practice that has ‘roots in Indian culture’.

That’s according to student leaders at the University of Ottawa, who put pressure on a yoga teacher at the uni’s Centre for Students with Disabilities to call off her yoga classes. She was told ‘there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice’. In these people’s minds, in which the Offence-Seeking Antenna is forever turned to High, a white person doing yoga is not that different to a white person donning blackface and singing ‘Mammy’.

O’Neill goes on to point out:

The PC rage against cultural appropriation is ultimately a demand for cultural segregation, for black people, white people, Latinos, gay people, women and every other racial, gender or sexual group to stick with their own culture and people and not allow themselves to be diluted by outsiders.

Gay men have been condemned by the National Union of Students for ‘appropriating black female culture’. Barmy NUS officials think it’s the height of racism for a gay guy to talk about having an ‘inner black woman’. The irony being that it’s hard to think of anything more racist, or at least racially divisive, than the ideology of cultural appropriation: its obsession with cultural purity echoes some of the darkest political movements of the twentieth century.

It’s easy to dismiss these incidents as merely a case of a few activists getting a bit too carried away, or going a bit too far. But incidents such as these are happening more  and more often, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Whether it is British students shutting down a debate about abortion and trying to get Germaine Greer banned from campus, or pampered Yale students insisting that the point of university is not to learn but rather to feel warm and snuggly, these stories are becoming more extreme, more frequent and ever more ludicrous to the uninitiated.

This is in large part because the authorities – university chancellors, society presidents and anyone else called upon to be an auxiliary parent to these toddlers-with-diplomas – too often reward this hysterical behaviour by apologising for offending the Stepford Students and giving in to every one of their tyrannical demands. Which then encourages the next crop of baby-faced tyrants to make even more outrageous demands in the name of creating a “safe space”.

With their accusations of “cultural appropriation” and unquestioning embrace of the politics of identity, these student activists are starting to create a New Apartheid – on their university campuses and in their hermetically sealed social circles of likeminded social justice warriors. Their overriding concern with protecting the “purity” of various minority cultures resembles nothing so much as the anti-miscegenation laws of the last century. And all of this they do without a hint of irony.

These students are nothing so much as High Priests of the Politics of Identity. Like other clergy before them, they derive their power from claiming the exclusive ability to speak on behalf of their secular god and telling the rest of us what we must believe and say. But in place of stoning or crucifixion being the penalty for blasphemy we now have new, modern shamings carried out on social media.

In a famous scene from Aaron Sorkin’s show The Newsroom, the lead character described the American Tea Party – with their intolerance of dissent and insistence on ideological purity – as being like an American Taliban. But I wonder if the real progressive Taliban can’t actually be found on our university campuses, in our student union bars and in the front row of your nearest anti-austerity rally, shouting “Tory Scum!” at terrified old ladies.

If we let these fragile young tyrants win, we will eventually all be ghettoised, forced to keep strictly to our own “communities” (community being defined strictly by racial or religious criteria) and only allowed to engage with other people in the controlled environment of “safe spaces“, where our speech and behaviour is micromanaged to ensure that we do not “trigger” anybody else with the problematic “microaggression” of our mere presence.

Yes, there is a dangerous radicalisation process taking place on our university campuses today. But deluded young radicals are not only rallying to the black flag of ISIS – we should also mark those who drink so deep from the well of Social Justice that they would make us all slaves to their cause.

 

Yoga - Cultural Appropriation

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Middle Image: 4th Wave Feminism

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The Daily Toast: Hugo Rifkind On The Dilemma Of Labour Party Centrists

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Labour Centrists

Why don’t those members and activists who hate the new direction of the Labour Party simply leave?

It’s hard to bring yourself to leave an organisation when you have convinced yourself that everyone outside of it is hateful, immoral and evil. That’s the point Hugo Rifkind makes in his latest piece for the Spectator, a reflection on why there has been no hint of a centrist exodus from the Labour Party in the Age of Corbyn, despite much grumbling and plotting.

Rifkind wonders out loud:

What is wrong with these people? It’s like they’re children. Part of the madness comes, I suppose, from social media, whereby every utterance is ‘campaigning’, even if you’re just doing it in the office, on the loo. The bulk of it, though, is the idea that Labour people have to be Labour forever, even if they completely disagree with Labour, or else they’re not Labour. It’s weird and it’s needy and it’s anti–intellectual, and it makes no sense at all. They went big on this during the leadership election, when a host of people with politics virtually indistinguishable from Jeremy Corbyn’s were kicked out on the basis of prior support for the Greens or the Scots Nats. Because, of course, if they were true Labour they’d support Labour even while disagreeing with Labour, because that’s what Labour does.

Why does it? Nobody else behaves like this. Nobody else turns party into a tribe, not just putting loyalty over policy, but feigning a virtue with it, too. In any other party, anyone who disagreed with the party line as often as Corbyn has might have been expected to resign at least once, if only out of embarrassed deference to the voters who had blithely ticked the ‘Labour’ box. Perhaps due to its history, though, Labour is not merely a jumble of policies in the manner of other parties. Labour is a ‘movement’ and if you aren’t with it, you’re against it. No matter which direction it currently happens to be moving in.

An interesting argument, but it’s hardly as if the other main political parties are chock full of people who resign in fits of pique and then come crawling meekly back in rhythm with party policy. The only really noteworthy defections of the past few years are those of Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell – both from the Tories to UKIP.

So while the gulf between the Corbyn left and the Blairite centre of the Labour Party may be particularly large, right-wing Tory MPs such as John Redwood and Bill Cash – with no frontbench career aspirations of their own to worry about – are just as unlikely to leave the Conservative party in disgust at David Cameron as Chuka Umunna or Andy Burnham are about to forsake Labour out of despair with Corbyn.

Rifkind closes by admonishing the centrists:

This is what happens when you brainwash yourself into believing that your lot are the only good guys; when you forget that it’s not the club that matters, but what the club does. This is what happens when you grow so used to feeling superior to everybody outside Labour that you can no longer properly believe such people are proper, moral humans at all. It’s not a church. It’s not a sin to go somewhere else for a bit if you need to. Not when the nuts do it, and not when you do either. Pull yourselves together. People are laughing.

This part is very true, and speaks to a sickness at the heart of the Labour Party – and the British Left in general – which this blog was one of the first to report on, and the most consistent in highlighting.

There are many reasons why Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party is not yet provoking an exodus. First, there is the hope that Corbynism may yet prove to be a passing phase, and that a couple of years of underperformance or a 2020 general election defeat will shock the Left back to its senses. Second, there is the self-protective instinct most Labour MPs have over their political careers – breaking away to start a new political party rarely leads to career advancement and power. But thirdly, there is what Hugo Rifkind calls the “tribal” instinct – that same stubborn unwillingness to leave which kept Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party for all his long wilderness years, and which now keeps the centrists grimly hanging on.

Would it be so hard for the centrists to step away from the Labour Party had they not grown up telling themselves that the Evil Tories represent everything bad about Britain, that Britain’s greatness can be summed up by the output of our public services alone, and that Labour have a monopoly on both wisdom and compassion? Probably not. But they did, and they still do.

Back when the Labour leadership contest was still raging, this blog argued:

If Jeremy Corbyn is not the answer to Labour’s irrelevance, whoever ends up taking the party forward will need to explicitly make peace with capitalism, and undo the bad blood created by Gordon Brown’s brooding statism and the hand-wringing “predators vs producers” equivocation of Ed Miliband. And this will require explicitly praising the virtues of capitalism, and potentially letting the Jeremy Corbyn-led wing of the party split off and float away back to the 1970s.

This does not mean that the remaining rump of the Labour Party should then cast itself as just another centrist alternative to the Tories – British politics desperately needs real ideological variety and choice. But the future ideological lines will be drawn over how to make capitalism work for all the people, with laissez-faire small government types on one side, and bigger government interventionists on the other.

[..] Sniping at capitalism while conspicuously enjoying the fruits of all that it provides has proven to be a deeply unconvincing platform. And it won’t become any more convincing, or win Labour any new voters, by the time of the next election.

So can a Labour Party at peace with the free market still stand for anything, and be a party of clear principle and ideological coherence? Absolutely. But it won’t happen by chance, it will require careful and determined consideration.

But Jeremy Corbyn did win the contest, and it is clear that the Labour Party will not “make peace” with capitalism so long as he remains leader. And in some ways that’s fine – I supported Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy precisely because I wanted to end the stale centrist consensus which currently grips British politics.

However, it does leave those centrists in a bind: disagreeing with nearly everything their leader says, used to attacking capitalism themselves in their lazy campaign rhetoric, but increasingly coming to appreciate capitalism the more they look at Corbyn’s alternative.

If Corbyn looks as though he will stay in power up to the 2020 general election, at some point the centrists will have to jump. And when they do, they will be ruthlessly attacked and vilified by precisely those voices who currently believe that virtue and salvation can only be found within the Labour Party.

But if the centrists wish to stay in politics and be taken seriously, what other choice will they have?

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Are People Waking Up To Left Wing Virtue-Signalling?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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When it comes to the British political debate, what you say now matters more than what you do. The BBC has apparently just noticed this trend

The standard Daily Politics slapstick comedy treatment makes it almost unwatchably patronising, but this segment of the BBC’s dumbed-down flagship political programme is actually on to something.

Last week, the Daily Politics invited journalist James Bartholomew – coiner of the phrase “virtue signalling” – on the show to talk about why more and more of us stop after stating our good intentions rather than following through by acting on them.

First, we get this candid and refreshingly frank take on the virtue-signallers:

“Virtue signalling without actually doing anything is not true virtue. It is self-righteous, vain and silly. It’s not what you say or think that matters, it’s what you do.”

Bartholomew then offers this interesting angle:

“I think the welfare state is a lot to do with it. People feel that they have outsourced their decency. I’ve paid my taxes, therefore I don’t have to do anything. I think that’s part of the cause, why virtue signalling without actually doing anything has increased.

[..] But what really irritates me is those people who I’ve met, in contrast to people who do real good, the people who think ‘oh, I can say I hate the Daily Mail and I hate UKIP, and I vote Labour once every five years. I’m a morally superior person.’ And that really irritates me because there are people who go out and make sacrifices and effort.”

I think there’s a lot of truth in this idea that the welfare state leads us to outsource our decency. Obviously there are many people who both contribute to the welfare state through their taxes and also find the time and resources to do additional good in their communities. But there are also many of us who do not.

There are too many of us who think that an angry Facebook meme or a lazy re-tweet counts as doing something meaningful and helpful. You could argue that we see the same phenomena every time something like the Ice Bucket Challenge sweeps the internet – a well intentioned fundraising initiative that soon led to large numbers of (particularly young) people uploading their own videos out of a desire to participate and show off, without then going on to make the all-important cash donation to MND charities.

This phenomena is an annoyance when it is confined to the social or charitable arena, but it becomes most problematic – and distorting – when it starts taking over the field of politics. Bartholomew himself has written about how the virtue signalling Left make any serious discussion about the future of British healthcare almost impossible:

It’s noticeable how often virtue signalling consists of saying you hate things. It is camouflage. The emphasis on hate distracts from the fact you are really saying how good you are. If you were frank and said, ‘I care about the environment more than most people do’ or ‘I care about the poor more than others’, your vanity and self-aggrandisement would be obvious, as it is with Whole Foods. Anger and outrage disguise your boastfulness.

One of the occasions when expressions of hate are not used is when people say they are passionate believers in the NHS. Note the use of the word ‘belief’. This is to shift the issue away from evidence about which healthcare system results in the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. The speaker does not want to get into facts or evidence. He or she wishes to demonstrate kindness — the desire that all people, notably the poor, should have access to ‘the best’ healthcare. The virtue lies in the wish. But hatred waits in reserve even with the NHS. ‘The Tories want to privatise the NHS!’ you assert angrily. Gosh, you must be virtuous to be so cross!

This blog made the same point on the NHS only yesterday.

But whether it’s worshipping the NHS, opposing the bedroom tax or hating George Osborne’s plans for tax credits, it is clear that millions of people are willing to share a supportive tweet or Facebook post, but less willing to do anything else – even so much as vote in accordance with their own social media timelines, as Ed Miliband discovered to his cost on May 7.

Why is this? Are people that self-centred that they’ll give the poor a swipe of their thumb if they come across a lefty meme on their phones while commuting to work, but won’t march down to their local polling booth? Or are these lefty memes being shared not because people have given serious thought to the issues at stake, but rather because Politics via Social Media encourages everyone to treat their political opinions like this season’s fashion, casually adopting or discarding opinions in order to fit in with the group and gain acceptance by one’s peers?

Both factors are probably at play. But one thing is clear: when we are all so busy “raising awareness” of our pet causes on social media, we neglect the people actually making real-world policy at our own peril.

NOTE: It should be pointed out that virtue-signalling exists on the political Right, too, though not to the same extent. In the United States, some of the more craven military-fetishising and quasi-religious #humblebrags (“Feeling so blessed that the Lord has graced me with this promotion / pay rise / new washing machine”) would certainly count as virtue-signalling. And elements of the online meme-sharing Tea Party clearly got caught up in a bubble of their own and deluded themselves into expecting a Mitt Romney victory in the 2012 presidential election. So the phenomenon does cut both ways.

Sexual Consent Class - Consent Educator

Social Justice Warrior

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h/t Guido Fawkes

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