Over the last 10 years, the terms of political debate have changed completely \u2013 and week by week they seem to get worse<\/p>\n
The notion of virtue-signalling \u2013 the act of performing progressive stances that don\u2019t cost you anything in order to burnish your own moral credentials \u2013 has been around since at least the 00s<\/a>. In <\/strong>a political sense, it meant always being the one who reminded others to say \u201cchairperson\u201d not \u201cchairman\u201d; always manning the barricades for signs of bigotry, always being on the right demo. If its values were sound \u2013 all we\u2019re talking about, really, is trying to systematise courtesy to others \u2013 it was often easy to lampoon, because it felt performative and had a hair-trigger.<\/p>\n But what has risen in its wake \u2013 vice-signalling \u2013 cannot be seen as its mirror or answer, any more than dehumanisation could be seen as the equal and opposite of decency. They\u2019re not in the same rhetorical category. The term doesn\u2019t bring itself to life; for that you need the US president. Cast your mind back to 2015; although Donald Trump had said he might run for election to the highest office in every cycle this century, his speech in Trump Tower was his first campaign launch, and it was where he announced that he would build a wall between the US and Mexico. In seemingly unplanned remarks<\/a> \u2013 the grammar was off, the structure meandered, the vocabulary was vague and repetitive \u2013 he said \u201c[Mexico] are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and they\u2019re rapists.\u201d<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the last 10 years, the terms of political debate have changed completely \u2013 and week by week they seem to get worse The notion of virtue-signalling \u2013 the act of performing progressive stances that don\u2019t cost you anything in order to burnish your own moral credentials \u2013 has been around since at least the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}