Virtue Signaling and Wokeism: Power, Discontent, and the Reckoning 

May 2025 

In the annals of modern fashion—by which I do not mean haberdashery, but the shifting winds of moral enthusiasm—there is perhaps no phenomenon more symptomatic of our times than the rise of performative virtue. The years 2023 and 2024 saw social media not as a neutral mirror of human events, but as a stage upon which righteousness, or the appearance thereof, could be deftly curated, distributed, and applauded.

Suddenly, the great public, long somnolent before images of famine, civil wars, or environmental decay, awakened—if only briefly—to proclaim solidarity. Hashtags replaced conviction, filters stood in for reflection, and the swift rotation of digital causes resembled less a moral awakening than a theatre of fleeting allegiances. Here was a novel paradox: an age overwhelmed by crises yet reduced to gestures.

It is tempting to dismiss all this as the empty chatter of platforms designed for entertainment. Yet this theatrical ethic did not remain confined to personal feeds. Over the last decade it seeped, with remarkable velocity, into the arteries of commerce. Venture-backed enterprises, consumer-facing startups, and global brands alike adopted a new vocabulary—not of products and margins, but of values and missions. The corporation, once content to sell wares, now sought to elevate consciousness.

Consider the curious case of WeWork, a company whose financial acrobatics culminated in the invention of “community-adjusted EBITDA”—a metric so thoroughly evacuated of cost that one wondered whether numbers, too, had found religion. The premise was sublime: strip away the burdens of rent, depreciation, and loss, and what remains is moral purpose. Never mind the balance sheet—behold the vision.

Bumble was no mere dating app; it was a feminist manifesto with a swipe function. Oatly, rather than a milk substitute, became a planetary crusade in a bottle. Even the misadventures of Better.com were dressed in the garb of virtue, cloaked in values of transparency and inclusion until those values collided with mass Zoom layoffs and internal disarray.

These examples do not indict virtue per se. They indict the curious tendency to conflate articulation with execution. One may forgive a company for ambition, but not for mistaking slogans for systems. What emerged was a form of virtue-signaling culture—a pattern of noble declarations suspended in a vacuum, untethered to behavioral discipline. Rhetoric, divorced from practice, became the very vice it purported to oppose.

Culture, as David J. Friedman has wisely observed, is not built upon ideals alone. Values must descend into action, else they risk becoming ornaments—pretty, but functionless. Behavior, not belief, is the currency of trust.

The world of venture capital, never a stranger to ideological enthusiasm, has in recent years succumbed to a peculiar kind of moral inflation. ESG, DEI, and impact—the talismans of modern virtue—have become the lingua franca of pitch decks, investor memos, and annual letters. Sincerity, in some cases, undoubtedly abides. Yet far too often, one observes a troubling slide from conviction to choreography.

Once it is understood—whether whispered in boardrooms or tacitly agreed upon in term sheets—that capital may be secured more readily through sentiment than scrutiny, the market undergoes a quiet transformation. It ceases to reward substance and begins to prize symbolism. We then arrive at what the economists, in their dry wisdom, call a market for lemons—a place where the earnest are outnumbered by the artful, and where noble intentions are crowded out by opportunists peddling virtuous snake oil.

In such an environment, diligence lags behind reputation, and reputation itself is increasingly decoupled from performance. The signal—the well-crafted narrative, the polished manifesto—begins to eclipse the messy, slower business of execution. This is not simply a distortion of incentives; it is a corruption of the moral language that underpins trust in the marketplace.

It would be unwise and ungenerous to mock the instinct to do good. Society depends upon its moral energies. But when morality is reduced to a mechanism for visibility, and goodness becomes a style rather than a struggle, something essential is lost. The dignity of action gives way to the vanity of display.

In earlier times, business was seen as a sober matter of goods, services, and efficiency. Today, it is tempted by the allure of sanctity. Yet sanctity, when advertised too freely, ceases to persuade. The public, for all its credulity, possesses an excellent nose for hypocrisy.

The task ahead is not to renounce values but to ground them—in behaviour, in systems, and in action. The performative impulse must yield to the practical. And the signal, if it is to endure, must be married to the deed.

On the Passing of an Age: Reflections on Virtue and Its Discontents

The return of Mr. Trump to the White House in 2024, though sensational in its particulars, should not be misapprehended as a mere episode of electoral vengeance. It was, rather, the visible crest of a broader cultural tide—a revolt not simply against a party or platform, but against an entire aesthetic of moral posturing that had, in recent years, permeated American institutions, corporations, and public life.

By the time the campaign was underway, the term “woke”—originally born of moral vigilance—had undergone a swift and ironic devaluation. Once an earnest call to justice, it now served as shorthand for a new species of orthodoxy: a performance of virtue so heavily codified and so lightly rooted in lived concern that it invited, not admiration, but fatigue.

Indeed, one could not move through the digital or institutional spheres without encountering this phenomenon. DEI seminars, ESG declarations, and algorithmically curated affirmations of justice became as ubiquitous as they were interchangeable. Yet for the average citizen—beset by inflation, precarious wages, rising rents, and diminishing faith in expertise—these gestures rang hollow. The form of righteousness endured; its content, alas, did not.

It was into this vacuum of sincerity that Mr. Trump re-entered, not merely as a political actor but as an avatar of grievance. His campaign, conducted with the rough-hewn theatricality we have come to expect, spoke not only against Democrats but against an entire elite apparatus—one perceived to be obsessed with symbolic rectitude while inattentive to material distress.

The opposition, for their part, misjudged the moment. Despite internal data pointing squarely to economic precarity as the dominant concern, the Democratic message persisted in its moral idiom: defending democracy, amplifying identity, cautioning against regression. All noble causes, to be sure. But nobility poorly timed can be indistinguishable from evasion.

Even the best-performing campaign appeals—those of the Vice President, for instance—spoke not of rights or representation, but of groceries. This, one might say, was the electorate’s quiet rejoinder: speak not of virtue, but of price.

The fracturing of the traditional Democratic coalition was notable. Young men, once considered reliable progressives, drifted toward anti-woke influencers who offered a blunt, if brittle, diagnosis of cultural decay. Meanwhile, non-white and immigrant voters—often assumed to be natural allies of progressivism—exhibited growing skepticism. For many, the currency of elite virtue no longer bought belief.

In the corporate world, too, a retreat was underway. ESG and DEI, once paraded with conviction—or at least confidence—slipped underground. Marketing departments grew cautious; shareholder revolts proliferated; and the triumphant language of stakeholder capitalism gave way to silence. What was once advantageous became controversial. The aesthetic of virtue, it turned out, had a shelf life.

Even among advocates of ethical business, a note of sobriety emerged. Professor Hitendra Wadhwa’s call to return to the older, less fashionable virtues—fairness, humility, courage—was less a repudiation of justice than a plea for its quiet restoration. What we require, he seemed to say, is character, not choreography.

The contrast between Trump’s coarseness and the progressive polish became, paradoxically, a referendum on authenticity. The fast food pit stops, the gaffes, the unfiltered speech—all served, for a not insignificant portion of the electorate, as signals of realness in a world saturated with curated sincerity.

The 2024 election, then, was not a victory for a party so much as a repudiation of an era. It marked the collapse of a certain performative economy of virtue—one in which optics replaced outcomes, and symbolic acts were mistaken for civic repair.

What follows must be a reckoning. Not a return to cynicism, but a revaluation of what it means to lead, to persuade, to serve. The age of theatrical virtue is passing. In its place, let us hope, may arise a politics more attentive to consequence than to applause.

Real problems—those of wages, housing, healthcare, belonging—require real solutions. Not hashtags. Not audits. Not stagecraft. But structure, substance, and the old-fashioned art of doing the work.

So what happened ? The Revolt Against Liberalism

The recent convulsions against liberalism—popularly packaged under the banners of “anti-woke” or “anti-elitist”—ought not to be dismissed as the simple tantrum of the reactionary mind. On the contrary, they mark the outward symptom of a deeper constitutional malaise: the decay of liberal democracy’s promises, the atrophy of its moral confidence, and the estrangement of those whom it once professed to champion.

What was once the party of the trade unionist, the wage earner, and the local steward of civic life has drifted—drifted, it must be said, not by accident but by design. The Democratic Party, in its quest for a post-industrial electorate, did not so much lose the working class as discard it. Mr. Biden’s presidency, rather than inaugurating a new chapter, served only as a parenthesis—a temporary pause in the story of political dislocation. With Mr. Trump’s return to office in 2024, we are compelled to admit that 2016 was not an aberration but a structural realignment.

The prelude to this crisis lies not in the personalities of the present, but in the dogmas of the past. From the 1980s onward, a bipartisan consensus emerged—one that enthroned markets as sovereign and relegated politics to the role of steward. Neoliberalism, in its various Anglo-American guises, became the intellectual orthodoxy: the state retreated, capital was unshackled, and globalisation was praised as both natural and inevitable.

To be clear, this epoch delivered many gains. Global output expanded, financial capital became fluid, and efficiencies abounded. But the fruits were unevenly shared. While aggregate wealth soared, wages for the average worker stagnated, and once-vibrant communities were hollowed out. The rising tide, we were assured, would lift all boats. In reality, it elevated the yachts and left the fishing boats to rot in the harbour.

Thus resentment fermented, not only economic but existential. The globalised elite, commuting between Davos and Aspen, spoke of inclusive growth while sneering at those who failed to applaud. To the working man or woman—to say nothing of the disaffected youth—the liberal order ceased to be an agent of emancipation and became instead a bureaucratic instrument of judgment.

Into this breach stepped the populist tribunes. Mr. Sanders on the left, and Mr. Trump on the right, each tapped into a vein of frustration long ignored by the technocratic consensus. But while Mr. Sanders sought to revive the ghost of class politics, Mr. Trump, with characteristic theatricality, turned grievance into an art form. His attacks on the so-called “woke,” on media mandarins and moralising elites, resonated not despite their crudeness, but because of it. His vulgarity, curiously, was his claim to authenticity.

Meanwhile, liberalism grew sanctimonious. It moralised globalisation, treating its mechanics as moral imperatives, and conflated cosmopolitanism with virtue. To question the wisdom of open borders or the infallibility of free trade was to risk denunciation. Grievances born of displacement were recast as xenophobia; cultural dislocation was pathologised as bigotry. Such was the new clerisy—armed not with cassocks but credentials.

Civic life, too, underwent a withering. Freedom, once a shared enterprise of citizens, became redefined as personal autonomy—liberty without fraternity. The public square narrowed. The rich and poor no longer shared buses or schools, nor even metaphors. Class segregation became geographic, epistemic, and moral.

Identity politics, originally a necessary corrective to history’s exclusions, grew rigid with time. The pursuit of group recognition came to eclipse the search for common cause. A politics of grievance, once righteous, became brittle. The working majority—of all colours and creeds—found themselves less represented than sorted, less heard than managed.

The pandemic revealed the fracture; post-pandemic life made it visible. In one world: remote work, ESG panels, Zoom empathy. In the other: rising rent, fragile employment, and a creeping sense that the country was slipping away. The elite trafficked in symbolism; the public seethed with ressentiment. And in the middle—collapsed trust, evaporating patience.

Virtue Signaling: Evolutionary Strategy or Modern Moral Theater?

Once a neutral sociological concept, “virtue signaling” has become a loaded phrase in today’s culture wars—used to mock, shame, or discredit public displays of morality. But beneath the ridicule lies a nuanced phenomenon with deep roots in evolutionary biology, social psychology, and moral philosophy. Is virtue signaling mere performative fluff, or does it serve a more complex social function?

Virtue signaling refers to the act of publicly expressing moral beliefs—often through low-cost actions like profile picture changes, hashtags, or denouncing a public figure—to demonstrate one's alignment with popular moral norms. Critics argue that such behavior is shallow, designed to boost status without demanding sacrifice. British journalist James Bartholomew popularized the term as a critique of those who, in his words, “say the right things” without doing the hard things—like caring for elderly relatives or working quietly for justice. In this view, moral posturing replaces moral substance. Declaring hatred for the Daily Mail, for instance, may signal allegiance to a progressive tribe more than any concern for media ethics. It is a performance, not a principle.

It is a common conceit of our age to imagine that we have invented our maladies. But virtue signaling, that much-maligned habit of modern man, is no invention of TikTok nor the fevered offspring of campus jargon. It is, rather, a refinement—sometimes regrettable—of an ancient and evolutionary necessity.

Long before the trading floors of Wall Street or the digital temples of Silicon Valley, our ancestors signaled worth through visible sacrifice. A brave deed in the hunt, a generous gift in the feast, a loyal defence in the quarrel—these were costly signals, difficult to counterfeit and rich in social reward. They conveyed not only capacity, but character. Like the peacock’s tail, these displays invited admiration precisely because they were expensive, burdensome, and therefore credible.

But we no longer live among sabretooths and skin tents. In our world, the tweet has replaced the spear, and the slogan stands in for the deed. The cost of signaling has diminished, and with it, its credibility. A moment’s indignation posted online, a pin worn on a blazer, a banner draped across a corporate landing page—these are the modern iterations of virtue, offered often without risk, sacrifice, or follow-through.

The result, perhaps predictably, is suspicion. For we are still evolution’s children, wired to value costly displays and to discount the effortless as theatrical. We look with reverence upon courage that costs something. We recoil from loud proclamations untethered to labour, risk, or loss.

This instinctual discernment now governs not only our social perception of individuals, but our assessment of institutions. Corporations, it seems, have taken to virtue with the enthusiasm once reserved for mergers and acquisitions. We are no longer content with brands that merely provide; they must now believe. Apple signals openness, Subaru empathy, Goldman Sachs—if not humility—at least precision. But woe betide the firm whose marketing outpaces its morals. A “sustainable” brand that exploits labour will not be forgiven for long. The gap between image and reality is now policed with the intensity once reserved for balance sheets.

There is a psychological irony at play. Each of us, in the quiet chambers of our conscience, believes our virtue sincere. Yet we regard our neighbours’ virtue with a knowing eye and a raised brow. Their display, we suspect, is for show. Our own? A natural extension of belief. Thus attribution bias does its mischief, and mistrust multiplies.

Yet we ought not be too cynical. Not all signaling is hollow, nor all performance insincere. When virtue costs—when it demands time, effort, money, or reputation—it still functions as it once did: to reveal character, build trust, and coordinate cooperation. Even modest signals can matter. For those without wealth or platform, a message posted or a cause supported may be the only feasible form of participation. It is neither just nor wise to sneer at all expression merely because some of it is shallow.

Moreover, moral language, however symbolic, serves as a compass. Hashtags may be imperfect, but they mark the terrain. They map the outrage, they cohere the crowd, they challenge silence. #BlackLivesMatter, whatever its distortions, made visible a structure of neglect long ignored. And visibility, if not a solution, is a necessary precondition for one.

Still, there are risks. The digital commons rewards not sincerity, but spectacle. In such an environment, moral positioning becomes a form of competitive escalation. The incentive is not to be just, but to be seen to be just—louder, faster, purer. This is the inflation of virtue, where each successive signal must outdo the last. The consequence is not cohesion, but tribalism; not clarity, but moral arms races. We are no longer arguing principles, but competing for applause.

Signaling, it must be said, is not partisan. Progressives trumpet inclusion, conservatives tradition. Trump supporters signal anti-elitism with as much fervour as any campus activist. Each tribe speaks its own moral dialect, reinforcing its boundaries through display. Social media, that curious engine of self-presentation, accelerates this, rewarding outrage and punishing nuance. Thus emerges the phenomenon we call “cancel culture”—a formalization of the signaling economy, in which deviation is disciplined and moral conformity becomes a currency.

This environment is particularly hostile to outsiders. Immigrants unfamiliar with shifting taboos, neurodivergent individuals who misread cues, those without the cultural script—all risk exclusion in the very communities that profess inclusion. Here, freedom of speech becomes not merely a legal right, but a moral necessity: not to defend cruelty, but to protect dialogue across fractured moral terrains.

We would do well to revisit the foundations. As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt reminds us, liberals and conservatives are guided by different moral intuitions—care and fairness on one side; loyalty, sanctity, and authority on the other. What appears virtuous to one may strike the other as vanity or even vice. If we do not understand these differences, we mistake fellow citizens for enemies.

Virtue Signaling: Mimetic Desire in a Status-Driven World

Virtue Signaling, I suspect, a deeply human expression, rooted not in the decadence of social media, but in the very architecture of our social instincts. If the phrase offends, it is not because it is false, but because it is uncomfortably familiar.

The French theorist René Girard, whose thought has lost none of its clarity despite the obscurity in which some would like to keep it, argued that human desire is not autonomous. We do not, contrary to our flattering beliefs, know what we want. We learn to want what others appear to want. Our desires are triangulated—passing not from object to subject, but from model to subject via the object. We desire the thing because it is desired by someone we admire. And soon enough, we desire it against them.

This dynamic, Girard argued, is the root of rivalry. For in mimetic desire, the object is never merely utilitarian—it is symbolic, it is social. We seek not the thing, but the esteem the thing confers. It is not the object itself, but its reflection in the eyes of another that stirs the will.

In an age of digital mirrors and algorithmic repetition, this psychology has found a new stage. A slogan, a filtered post, a virtue-laden brand: these are not merely signals of conviction, but instruments of recognition. They tell others who we are—or more precisely, who we wish to be seen as. In a world where ancestral displays of generosity were costly and public, today's signals are often frictionless, disembodied, and immediate. And this, I think, is where unease begins.

We are evolutionarily suspicious of signals that cost nothing. Our ancestors learned, with good reason, to doubt the warrior who spoke bravely and fled quietly. Credibility, in a social species, was hard-won. Today, a moral stance can be adopted with the ease of a retweet. And yet, we still hunger for authenticity, and recoil—often unconsciously—from the scent of self-promotion.

But we must not underestimate the subtlety of our minds. As the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers showed, deception is most effective when it is internalized. We lie best when we first lie to ourselves. If I believe myself to be virtuous, I am more persuasive to others—and perhaps to myself as well. Thus, self-deception is not simply a psychological oddity, but an evolutionary asset. It fosters confidence; and confidence, in the currency of status, often passes for truth.

Indeed, status is the unspoken engine of modern morality. In an era where wealth hides behind abstraction and dominance is cloaked in manners, moral capital emerges as the new currency. We no longer wish simply to be good; we must also be seen to be good. And social platforms, with their machinery of metrics, transform this moral theatre into a competitive sport. Likes and shares are no longer tokens of interest, but talismans of virtue.

Yet we err if we imagine this is the preserve of one political tribe. Progressives signal compassion, inclusivity, and justice. Conservatives, with no less fervour, signal loyalty, honour, and order. Even rebellion is mimetic: the anti-woke gesture mirrors the moral absolutism it derides. One need only reverse the polarity to see the same pattern. Much of what passes for individuality is, in truth, tribal choreography.

This does not mean that signaling is fraudulent by nature. Far from it. To signal is to speak—to declare allegiance, to establish norms, to build coordination in a world of strangers. It is the basis of trust in any social system. But like all speech, its value lies in context and cost. The signal that is costly—borne by sacrifice, risk, or genuine consequence—commands respect. The signal that is cheap invites suspicion.

The real danger is not signaling per se, but its inflation—when performance eclipses principle, and visibility replaces engagement. We risk cultivating a moral culture in which outrage is performative, consensus is coerced, and the appearance of care stands in for its practice. The theatre remains, but the script has grown thin.

We are not, at heart, rational calculating agents. We are mimetic creatures, drawn to mirrors, shaped by status, and governed by the quiet compulsion to belong. We perform, we believe, and we conform—often without knowing why.

The Paradox of Calling Out “Virtue Signaling”

The backlash against what is now broadly termed "wokeism"—and the liberalism that often rides in tandem with it—is no passing squall. It is not a childish resentment of progress, nor mere spleen from the provinces. It is, rather, the authentic response to a failure of sympathy and imagination on the part of those who presumed themselves to be society’s conscience. For if liberalism was once the political home of the working man and the thinking woman, it has come, in recent years, to sound too often like the speech of an educated class congratulating itself on its refinement.

This is no way to keep a house.

To say that liberalism now wears its virtues heavily is to put the matter gently. It preaches tolerance while practicing condescension. It speaks of justice but adorns itself with the privileges of status and speech that leave the many outside its temple, looking in with resentment. Its meritocracy, which once promised open doors to talent, has hardened into a caste system of credentials—flattering the winners, and imputing moral failing to the rest.

It is not enough for liberalism to defend its institutions or proclaim its benevolence on LinkedIn and lampposts. These are exercises in affirmation, not reform. What is required is harder: to exchange the lecture for the listening ear, the slogan for the shovel, and the high seat for common ground. Liberalism must, once more, be an enterprise of persuasion—not performance; of assimilation, not spectacle. Its renewal depends not on louder protestations of principle, but on quieter acts of policy—those which restore dignity to labour, secure prosperity that is broadly shared, and rebuild the civic spaces in which citizens might again meet as equals rather than as rivals.

It is in this climate of moral fatigue that “virtue signaling” has become a cultural shorthand. But like many phrases that gain sudden popularity, its sharpness cuts both ways. To accuse another of moral posturing is itself a kind of posture—a move that places the speaker above the fray, cloaked in worldly suspicion. The charge pretends to unmask vanity but often reveals its own: the vanity of knowing better, of seeing through what others are still naïve enough to believe.

Here we encounter a deeper problem still: the collapse in our presumption of sincerity. In our eagerness to detect strategy, we have come to suspect that all conviction is theatre, and all virtue pretense. But this is a dangerous mood for a society that depends, as all democracies must, on a minimal faith in one another’s intentions. As Sartre warned, to live in good faith is already difficult; as Camus reminded us, to rebel meaningfully requires that we begin by confronting delusion in ourselves. If every moral statement is presumed to be manipulative, then no shared standard can survive. Dialogue yields to diagnosis. Argument becomes autopsy.

The phrase “virtue signaling” itself performs a displacement. It moves attention away from what is said to why it is said—from public reasoning to private motivation. But political life cannot long endure if we treat all moral expression as camouflage for ambition. Machiavelli, with his usual cold brilliance, observed that rulers must appear virtuous whether or not they are. But Hume, in his softer wisdom, reminded us that while men are often selfish, they are not reducible to selfishness. To believe otherwise is not realism—it is caricature.

We must acknowledge, too, the role of self-deception in this performance. As Robert Trivers observed, our minds are constructed to persuade others, often by first persuading ourselves. A moral stance sincerely believed is a better mask than one cynically adopted. This makes sincerity no less real, but more complex. We are, after all, creatures who perform our values in the hope that they will become true.

Virtue signaling and sincerity, therefore, are not simple opposites. A public gesture may be shallow, or it may be aspirational—a first draft of moral seriousness. It may be the beginning of solidarity, or merely a badge. Its meaning lies in what comes after. When signaling becomes a substitute for action, when the performance of justice displaces its pursuit, then it becomes counterfeit. But the gesture itself—the signal—is not the problem. It is the failure to follow it with consequence.

Let us resist, then, the easy refuge of scorn. Let us treat signals not as frauds by default, but as invitations—imperfect, yes, but real—to engage, to clarify, to act. The line between performance and authenticity will never be perfectly drawn, because it runs through each of us. But in public life, as in private, to presume hypocrisy as the rule is to suffocate possibility.

Liberalism, if it wishes to endure—not merely as a cultural signifier, but as a political force—must abandon its airs of moral aristocracy. It must return to the habits of humility, the work of persuasion, and the discipline of substance. There is still time—though not infinite—to exchange the costume of virtue for its content. And in doing so, to rescue the democratic experiment not from its enemies, but from the weight of its own forgetfulness.