How the Left’s Phony Definition Game is Leading to America’s Death by Virtue-Signaling
What people say and do has become detached
I live at the beach. I often take a slightly longer route when I drive so I can get a better view of the intracoastal waterway. I regularly walk in the park. I have a garden in my back yard, have a half dozen plants on my living room table, and regularly pay more for organic food. I have air and water filters in my house. When I travel, even if I am going to a city, I make a special point of finding the most beautiful natural locations in the area to visit. For example, I took all of these pictures just last year and I could have posted 5 times as many.
Meanwhile, there are liberals who live in big cities. They breathe polluted air under the best of circumstances and get a big face full of that sewage smell you run across every so often in big cities every 3 or 4 streets. They pass lone trees surrounded by cement, but the last time they were “in nature” was when their parents took them to the beach 15 years ago. If you judged them by the lives they actually live, there is absolutely nothing that shows that they “care about the environment.” However, many of those same people will call themselves “environmentalists” and claim that people like me “don’t care about the environment.” Why? Because they completely buy into the scientifically dubious idea that manmade global warming is wrecking the climate and I do not. That’s it. That’s supposedly the dividing line in America between “caring about the environment” and “destroying the earth.” It’s the real-world version of this meme:
Incidentally, this is how almost everything works in modern politics these days.
There are conservatives galore who believe in a colorblind world, regularly support black conservative politicians, and happily pass around memes quoting Candace Owens and Thomas Sowell. They are called racist because they don’t support liberal policies. What exactly makes that the crucial line? Why couldn’t being AGAINST conservative policies just as easily be “proof” that you’re racist? It is true that there are more black Americans that support Democrats, but there are also plenty of black Republicans who believe conservative policies would do more to help black Americans than liberal policies. An even better question might be, “How is it that the most easily offended black Americans, who see racism in EVERYTHING, are the ones who get to define what’s racist?” Why is it treated as outrageous to say the average white American is a much better judge of what’s racist than professional race hustlers like Shaun King, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Joy Reid?
You see this in issue after issue in America. What proves that you “care about women?” Supporting abortion. How can that make sense when there are enormous numbers of conservative women that are pro-life? You’re “pro-immigrant” based on supporting illegal immigration? Well, what does that mean exactly and what skin do you have in the game? Are you living in fear because of groups of potentially armed strangers crossing your property that’s on the border? Are you offering to let illegal aliens move into your house? Along similar lines, I know people that tithe 10% of their income, have actually allowed poor people to live on their property rent-free, and have given up countless hours of their time to help the poor, yet most people on the Left would tell you they don’t “support the poor” because they’re against liberal policies. Meanwhile, those same liberal policies don’t work and trap people in poverty. There are people that have been in office for DECADES representing some of the poorest districts in America, but it’s hard to miss the fact that the people they represent don’t seem to be getting any less poor. Isn’t funny how we spend trillions on everything under the sun, but can’t ever seem to set aside a little money to objectively measure how well the particular programs our government puts in place actually work?
In the social media era, the relation between what people say they believe and what they do has become completely detached.
You prove where you stand, not by getting results or by putting your skin in the game, but by your attitude, the audacity of your proposals, and what you tweet. As
Modern politics is people trying to build followings by appealing to niche groups without any consideration of whether their ideas will work, have worked, or could ever work under the best of circumstances. Barack Obama broke every promise he made to sell Obamacare to the American people. Even his fellow liberals at PolitiFact had to admit that his, “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it” claim was the lie of the year. Undeniably, most Americans are paying significantly MORE for healthcare because of Obamacare and there’s also no question whatsoever that it hurts far more Americans than it helps. Yet, on the Left, it’s considered the biggest success of his presidency. What about AOC’s “Green New Deal?” It’s a completely unworkable, almost impossibly expensive, poorly thought-out nightmare that wouldn’t do anything to significantly address the idea of global warming across the globe, but she’s treated like a rock star on the Left for coming up with it. The fact that it’s an extreme monstrosity isn’t a bug for her, it’s a feature because the radicalism is treated as de facto evidence of how much she “cares” about the environment.
In one sense, all of this seems ludicrous, but advertisers have been playing this kind of game for a long time. They sell you Axe Body Spray by putting it in commercials with beautiful women. They sell you a car by associating it with a sense of freedom. They sell you McDonald’s by showing happy, smiling kids saying you’re the best mom ever. Of course, these are at least checkable assertions. If you buy Axe body spray and women are like, “That smells so cheap! Oh, it’s Axe, gross,” or your kids don’t run up and hug you after eating the garbage at McDonald’s, you learn the hard way that the ads are all bunk.
In politics, because we treat empty words as even more important than deeds and accomplishments, people never get that message. It’s as if talking about being good at playing basketball could make you Michael Jordan or bragging about how rich you are could turn you into Elon Musk. When cheap and easy virtue-signaling becomes more important than costly and difficult virtue, most people figure it makes more sense not to bother with going the extra mile. Why actually do anything that improves people’s lives when you get even more credit just for supporting a particular policy? Why try to find solutions for the country when you get better rewards for standing on the sidelines being snarky? How can the country be anything other than dysfunctional when the rewards in the political arena are given to those that talk a good game, not those that prove their worth in the real world?
If incentives matter and we get more of what we reward, then we should be asking ourselves why virtue-signaling has become so pervasive and why actual virtue is in such short supply that we are surprised when we run across it in politics.
Excellent essay, and great comment by Humdeedee. I've never imagined that a group of people could be so stupid that they would say; "oh, sure, he failed yet again, but we really like him and we know he meant well, so let's give him another chance, right?" Or, in this case, an entire political party, the Democrats, who make failure automatic, yet claim to be smarter and morally superior to conservatives, when it's exactly the opposite. The people who enable this foolishness trigger negative consequences for everybody, but they think that because "we were trying to help," that they deserve a free pass and another opportunity to run the show. Frustration doesn't hardly begin to describe it, esp when so much of what they try to do is nullify the votes of conservatives by any means necessary. As in John's thesis, Democrats talking about helping black people, when the whole history of the United States shows Democrats have always been the party that discriminates against, exploits and rips them off. Failure is a job enhancer in that foul joke of a political party; no wonder Hillary was annointed to win and it "had to be collusion" when she didn't. Just look at Adam Schiff- he's so delusional he doesn't have a clue how to speak the truth, but it's okay to the Left that he lies about everything.
Well done, John. Your description of the left's game is clear and truthful. The left is negative-life to the core, but they market a good story for those impressionable and easily led, or already locked into the jail of the leftist prison. How many women are in deep psychological pain because they believed the left's propaganda that abortion is a health care decision, and aren't most of them democrats? How many parents are seeing the results of their children's indoctrination in CRT, and watching them get sucked into the horror of transgenderism, and aren't most of them democrats? The people who know nothing but government dependence - aren't they all democrats? They see no escape. They keep voting for their own imprisonment because they are ignorant from years of democrat run schools that turn out people who have no skills or enough ability to hold a job that is better than minimum wage.
There are surely some democrats who are moderate and don't subscribe to the loud-mouthed, hate spewing progressives, but they are like conservatives. Busy working, raising families, and pursuing interests other than tearing apart our country. We need conservative voices like yours, telling it like it is.