This diary is about virtue-signaling.

Virtue-signaling is empty because it doesn't do anything about the situation supposedly connected to the virtue-signaling. It therefore has no consequences. No Black lives were saved because Nancy Pelosi dressed up in kente cloth.

Moreover, Nancy Pelosi dressing up in kente cloth did not stop the embezzlement of money from Black Lives Matter.

Virtue-signaling serves two important functions: 1) It is performed in front of a large audience, and 2) it makes the virtue-signaler feel good about him- or herself.

It's clear why people are drawn to virtue-signaling. Present-day global society is characterized by what Cornelius Castoriadis called "heteronomy." What "heteronomy" means is that we do not make our own laws; rather, the laws which constrain our behavior are imposed externally, through forces such as "money," the pursuit of which guides our adult lives, or a "political class," which makes our laws under the watchful eyes of a shadow government and donor class while pretending that we selected them. Virtue-signaling, then, creates a false (thus briefly appealing) sense of empowerment in its vain attempts to place events caused by out-of-control agencies under the control of "public opinion." We might, for instance, say "I stand with Israel" or "I stand with Palestine," as genocide is committed in Gaza. All of this activity is, unfortunately, empty, the first matter-at-hand being that Palestine is merely the geographic location which the government of Israel currently occupies as a predatory settler state. It is, however, revealing, since virtue-signaling serves as a mode of public confession.

The example of virtue-signaling that I will examine here is Maurice Isserman's essay in The Nation magazine, "Why I Just Quit DSA." It says here that Isserman was one of DSA's founding members. I will offer a reading of this piece for insights about the nature of virtue-signaling.

The first thing that needs to be said is that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is an organization whose main purpose is virtue-signaling. In word, DSA pretends to be socialist; but in behavior DSA is a support organization for the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party is a commodity rented by a wealthy political donor class. So the DSA performs a task which is the opposite of proletarian class struggle, ostensibly the primary motor of socialist politics.

What this means for Isserman is that his act of quitting is the ultimate piece of virtue-signaling. The point of virtue-signaling -- and here I say it in a smirking, Erving Goffman sort of way -- is to assert that one is signaling behind real, and not fake, virtue. Isserman is, then, telling us all that he is now too pure for DSA. He tells us his reason for doing so at the end of the first paragraph:

I left to protest the DSA leadership’s politically and morally bankrupt response to the horrific Hamas October 7 anti-Jewish pogrom that took the lives of 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and saw over 200 hostages carried off to Gaza, both groups of victims including children and infants.

News flash for Isserman: as members of an organization of Democrats pretending to be socialists, political and moral bankruptcy is the best DSA participants can do. Congratulations! You quit.

Isserman spills some ink discussing "entryism":

What do I mean by “entryists”? In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members.

I realize that this rhetoric was once popular with SDS, of which Isserman was briefly a member back in those Roaring Sixties, but -- really -- this is all ad hominem stuff. Rather than engage the issue, those who accuse others of "entryism" place organizational purity above the question of what is to be done.

Isserman then relates a history of DSA, most importantly of its recent new influx of members:

Unlike my generation, for whom the overriding issue of the late 1960s was opposition to the war in Vietnam, most of DSA’s new members were attracted to the organization by its proposals for substantial, vital, and above all realizable domestic reforms (Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, student debt relief, tenants’ rights, etc).

None of this stuff will actually be supported by the Democratic Party except as a form of virtue-signaling, however. (And how I would love to stand for single-payer!)

In this history, however, Isserman tells how "entryists" ruined it all for him, with an invocation of "Israel’s right to continued existence" at the end. This phrasing is far too common. Nobody can in fact do anything about Israel's right to continued existence, seeing as Israel is guaranteed massive yearly subsidies by the United States and is a nation-state possessing nuclear weapons. The point of invoking that phrase, then, is to virtue-signal for Israel's ability to do anything it wants, which at the current moment is genocide.

(That having been said, denouncing Hamas would be another piece of virtue-signaling, not a horrible one to be sure, but, still, with no consequences.)

Isserman then invokes Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, stating that "DSA’s National Political Committee did not agree with the two most prominent democratic socialists in American public life." But this is signaling behind people who aren't virtuous. Sanders and AOC's endorsements of Joe Biden's re-election bid should tell you all you need to know about them.

The article concludes by mentioning some celebrity "democratic socialists." My argument, here, must conclude too. In the same Nation issue there is a piece titled "Biden’s Israel-Palestine Policy Could Cost Him the Election." In this regard, it must be said that even though the author of this essay admits they want Joe Biden to be re-elected, refusing to vote for Joe Biden would be something we could all do that would NOT be virtue-signaling, because -- well, if we all did it, it would have consequences.

And if you are going to virtue-signal (smirks), be sure to signal behind something that is actually virtuous.

There are a few exceptions.