Virtue signaling is the act of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments meant to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on an issue. I want to contrast that with actions that are actually aimed at solving problems in the real world.
There’s been a lot of virtue signaling lately, and that’s what got me thinking about this. For example, you see memes on Facebook saying, “If you see a Nazi, punch them.” There’s a lot of celebration around the idea of punching Nazis. But the question I keep asking is: How does that actually create change in the real world?
Nazis in the United States are buffoons. I wrote an entire book, Culture of Make Believe, about how racism is often imagined as white-robed caricatures chanting “white power” with exaggerated Southern accents. But that’s not where the real danger lies.
My friend and mentor John Keeble, who studied white supremacist groups in the 1990s, once said we love to hate them because they’re an extreme, cartoonish example of the hatred and fear that runs throughout society. I'm not saying their attitudes aren’t deplorable—I’m saying they're easy targets.
Back in the 1990s, someone asked Michael Moore who the Michigan Militia were. He replied, “It’s the unemployed arm of the UAW.” It was a sophisticated point. These militias were a predictable response to collapsing capitalism and a vanishing middle class.
But recently, Moore’s analysis has shifted more toward virtue signaling. On MSNBC, he refused to even repeat the messages of neo-Nazis, saying they were so vile they shouldn't be spoken. That’s a huge difference from his earlier, more functional analysis—he was simply showing how virtuous he was.
This reminded me of an interview I did in the 1990s with Joel Dyer, who wrote Harvest of Rage. It was about how the farm crisis led desperate farmers into racist, militant organizations. His analysis was stark: if you’re sitting at your kitchen table with a shotgun in your lap, an empty bottle of Jack Daniels on the floor, wondering whether to end it all—and someone knocks on the door and says, “Hey brother, I feel your pain. Let’s talk”—you’ll listen.
If that person is a Mormon, you become a Mormon. If they’re a Jehovah’s Witness, you become a Jehovah’s Witness. If they’re an anti-capitalist leftist, same thing. If they’re a white supremacist, that’s what you become. It’s about desperation and who shows up with answers.
Many of the white supremacists in the news today are from the Rust Belt. That region has been gutted by NAFTA, global trade, and the slow collapse of empire.
When I began Culture of Make Believe, it was supposed to be just a five-page intro to an encyclopedia of hate groups. I started by asking, “What is a hate group?” I went to a KKK website, and they said, “We’re not a hate group—we're a love group. We love whites.” That left me with two options: either the KKK isn’t a hate group, or you can’t always trust rhetoric. That was the crack that opened up the whole book.
I saw a meme on Facebook saying, “If you see a Nazi, punch them.” But then I thought—some of us have been called Nazis just for opposing certain gender policies. So how do you define a Nazi? One guy replied, “If they call themselves a Nazi, they are one.” So apparently, the only Nazis you’re allowed to punch are the ones dumb enough to call themselves that. That doesn’t make any sense.
If you look at the numbers, the largest racist, segregationist organization in the U.S. is the prison system. It’s achieved levels of racial segregation that the KKK could only dream of.
So I started asking: in what ways does hatred manifest in our culture? One of the answers I came to is this—hatred, when felt long enough, stops feeling like hatred. It starts to feel like economics. It feels like pornography. It feels like the legal system. It feels like “just the way things are.”
And that’s part of the problem. Capitalism, and the supremacist system as a whole, is built on competition. It pits people against each other. As long as things are going smoothly and you can exploit those beneath you, you’re doing okay. But when the economy falters, competition intensifies, and the buried hatred comes roaring to the surface.
A great example comes from How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev. When the Irish came to the U.S. in the early 19th century, many were fleeing horrific conditions. Upon arrival, they had a choice: ally themselves with other working-class people, including free African Americans, or try to become “white”—try to move up the social hierarchy. As a group, they chose the latter.
When I read that, I imagined being an Irish immigrant. You left Ireland with six kids; two die on the boat. You arrive in America with four starving children and a wife. You need a job. And there’s a Black man willing to work for slightly less. You could stand in solidarity, but your kids are starving. So you do whatever you can to get that job.
This isn’t personal—it’s capitalism speaking through you. It creates racism. And once your child isn’t starving anymore, you buy into the system. Then baby needs new shoes. Then a college education. Then a house. A car. And suddenly, you're invested in that system. So once you've bought into the system, it's not simply life and death anymore, but the rewards are there to make it seem like it is.
My point in all this is that it is no surprise that the collapsing German economy led to the rise of the Nazi state. And it is no surprise that the KKK would do well in the United States during times of economic troubles. Because when there are economic troubles, people look for scapegoats. And because we are always so identified with the oppressor, and we must protect the oppressor at all times, most of us cannot look at the real source of our misery, which is capitalism and the supremacy system itself. Instead, we scratch and claw at those around us. So a white middle-class, or white lower-middle-class person who used to be middle-class and is now lower-middle-class and is on the verge of homelessness, can easily and wrongly rationalize that his problems are because of those women in the workforce, or because of those damn Mexicans from across the border, or because of those damn Black people. This is all a misdirection, and the source of the problems is the system itself, the system itself that pits us one against the other.
I think another part of the problem is that-I see this in simple living activists-and I see this in virtue signaling; they're closely related. I love the line by Erich Fromm: "I affect, therefore I am." When we are facing this huge system that is dreadfully destructive, and when we are seeing historical forces, and we are seeing the end of empire – and empire is ending – when we're seeing what's playing out with peak oil, the economy is undergoing what may seem to us on a day-to-day scale a slow collapse, but is in actuality a pretty fast collapse. Because a collapse is not like the walls of Jericho falling with trumpets blaring and people looking up and seeing a wall collapse on them. The collapse of an economy is a business going out of business and another one not replacing it. It's going through towns and seeing empty businesses. It's increasing centralization of wealth. It's what we see around us.
I'm not excusing the white supremacist or the hard right. I'm not excusing them at all. I'm attempting to understand them because we on the Left have to go back to the Joel Dyer comments. Instead of making our systemic analysis clear, we have virtue signaled, and we have claimed how morally superior we are, and that's not particularly helpful. One of the reasons this has to happen functionally is because a lot of us on the Left don't understand that the Democrats and the Republicans – we don't fully understand that they are good cop, bad cop, and that they are two sides of the same coin. And so you get the sort of so-called leftist press, MSNBC, etc., who cannot talk about the problem being capitalism because they have to serve their Democratic masters. And so all they can do is virtue signal.
I see this, honestly, I see this in, for example, the black bloc. A lot of the insurrectionary anarchists oppose organizing. I'm going to back up again. I was having a really interesting discussion the other day with Ramsey Kanaan, a wonderful anarchist publisher and organizer. He was talking about how there's a difference between mobilization and organization. He said you can mobilize on Facebook; you can mobilize like the Arab Spring got mobilized really quickly. But there's a huge difference between mobilizing and organizing. Mobilizing doesn't actually – we can mobilize a million people for a march, but if you're not organizing for long-term struggle, it didn't actually do any good. So we can mobilize a bunch of people to go punch Nazis in the face, and that's great, but how is that going to affect the systemic problems? In order to do that, you have to organize, and that's an entirely different situation.
This is a problem I have with some of the actions of the black bloc, for example, is that a lot of them are insurrectionary anarchists who have a disdain for organizing. They can be very good at mobilizing and getting people out, but there is no larger-scale organization. The plan is, "Let's go punch a Nazi in the face. Let's go raise some ruckus." And that is certainly useful at raising ruckus, but the question I always ask is, what does it accomplish in the longer term? If you aren't going to change the material conditions of society, then what you're left with is, "I can change myself. I can no longer use toilet paper. I can live really simply. I can back away." And I can also go on Facebook and I can say how much I hate Nazis. But if you really want to change things, what you need to do is change the material conditions of society such that it no longer creates Nazis. That's what we need to do: examine the roots of it and examine how capitalism systematically and functionally requires them, how supremacism requires the sort of white-robed buffoons and also requires a racist judicial system. And that's actually what I'm much more interested in doing: changing those foundations of society.
Here's one more thing I want to say. In Cultural Make-Believe, I was asking why it was that there were so many more lynchings after the Civil War than before. I was going along with it, not really getting anywhere, until I read this great line by Nietzsche, which is: "One does not hate when one can despise." And "despise" comes from the root "specere," which means to look down on – the same root as "spectacle." "Specere" means to look down upon. And so you despise someone who is below you on the hierarchy. As long as you can despise them, as long as, as a white person, you can have unfettered access to the lives and labor of Black people, then everything is fine from your perspective. But if that entitlement to exploit is threatened, then the hatred that underlay this contempt all along comes raging out. And so you see just a huge rise of lynchings post-American Civil War because no longer was that system of exploitation in place.
We see the same thing in domestic violence situations. As long as the wife provides the sex, as long as the wife makes sure the dinner's on the table, as long as she provides the resources to the superior male, everything is fine from his perspective. But when it's not, or when he has an excuse for it not to be, then the underlying hatred comes raging out. And we know that a woman who leaves a batterer is about, I believe it's seven or nine times more likely to be killed in the time when she's leaving because she's threatening that perceived entitlement to exploit.
I wish that we, in this culture, in this time of collapsing empire, would recognize this and plan for it, and recognize that white-robed buffoons and all of the right-wing forms of racism that we see around us are completely predictable aspects of a collapsing empire. And we would respond to them with more intelligence and utility than simply punching the buffoon in the face. What I want is for us to create a revolutionary mindset that understands and conveys the ways that capitalism, patriarchy, and supremacism set us against each other, and responds intelligently to that.
I would also want for us to recognize at the same time – and when I'm saying this, I'm not saying this means, "Oh, we need to just have compassion for the Nazis." I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is we need to recognize the functional aspects of it. And at the same time, we need to recognize that this is what happens historically, again and again, and we need to prepare ourselves for that too. Such that – this is one reason I argue all the time that we need to make our allegiance to women absolute now, because as mills close, it's predictable that rates of domestic violence go up. And as an entire economy shuts down, we know what happens when patriarchal civic society collapses: rates of rape go through the roof.
What we need to do is to prepare for that collapse and respond more intelligently to it than simply punching the person nearest to us. And we need to find ways to make our allegiance to women absolute, and we need to find ways to make our allegiance to other oppressed groups absolute as well, by which, of course, I'm including the natural world.
One of the reasons I feel that a functional analysis is so important is not because I believe that if you understand how something is happening and understand the social forces behind it, that this means that you can necessarily prevent it. But what it does mean is that you are more likely to be able to respond appropriately when it does happen, and you can ameliorate it, or you can affect the direction of it. Understanding how and why something happens is the first step, I think, toward responding appropriately to it.
Jensen
