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Joshua Ostroff is a Toronto-based journalist who writes about politics, science, parenting and culture.

In the dying days of the Cold War, the Reagan-energized right pushed back against communism, not by espousing democracy but by selling capitalism – a zeitgeist famously captured in the movie Wall Street’s decade-defining catchphrase: ”Greed is good.”

This rapacious philosophy rebuked the domestic centre-left’s kumbayas, social safety net and progressive taxation, as well as the foreign far-left’s journey into its darkest timeline. But to do so, it had to flip conventional morality upside down.

Now, with the ultimate avatar of eighties avarice in the White House, this moral role reversal has happened again and virtue has somehow become bad.

You may have noticed the rise of “virtue signalling” as a pejorative in tandem with the rise of political populism. The omnipresent accusation appears on Twitter multiple times a minute and is embedded in more than 35,000 articles on Google News. Tory MPs Michelle Rempel and Maxime Bernier lob it at Liberals all the time, and it was angrily thrown back at their leader, Andrew Scheer, for daring to tweet well wishes to Ismaili Muslims on Imamat Day.

Brexit bigwig Nigel Farage used it on TV to blast the speaker of the British House of Commons over anti-Trump comments. The Infowars video The Truth About Virtue Signalling has almost 500,000 views about this “vulgar ploy designed to incentivize others to regurgitate glib leftist narratives.” And, of course, controversial University of Toronto professor and bestselling author Jordan Peterson has employed it against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “genital-competence cabinet,” as well as provincial minimum-wage hikes and various diversity efforts, while similarly controversial Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd aimed the epithet at Indigenous land acknowledgements.

There is also an increasing backlash against the use of the term. Corner Gas creator Brent Butt recently tweeted: “HONEST QUESTION: Have you ever encountered anyone who used the phrase ‘virtue signalling’ who wasn’t also clearly a dipshit?” It received 11,000 likes and retweets within a few days and hundreds of comments, including one imagining it ”had to have been invented by a person who couldn’t fathom the concept of being nice without thought of reward.”

The term has academic origins in signalling theory – what most of us call “communicating” – but crossed into the mainstream a few years ago to impugn people for sharing “virtuous” political opinions on social media without backing them up in real life. It’s since been weaponized against all expressions of empathy, online and off, by implying that progressive political concerns – systemic racism, Indigenous inequality, trans rights, etc. – are only expressed to accrue social capital rather than promote social change.

Maybe some are expressing certain opinions for likes – or maybe that’s just people prone to using #MAGA (Make America Great Again) projecting. But why someone is against family separations or in favour of teaching sex-ed is irrelevant to those issues. If you disagree, debate their position not their motivation. All this ad hominem attack does is prevent dialogue between opposing sides.

Admittedly, attacking motivation is a cynically ingenious way to discredit someone’s political position without having to refute their substance because it’s not disprovable. You can’t know what anyone’s thinking – and wouldn’t believe them if they told you. Declaring someone a hypocrite is also particularly effective given populism’s straight-talk self-image. After all, the internet is rife with rants against asylum seekers, kneeling football players and Indigenous protesters. But apparently those folks are telling it like it is, while anyone supporting something that doesn’t benefit them directly must have ulterior motives. (The irony, of course, is that calling out virtue signalling is itself signalling and also delivers social credit. Yes, it’s an exhausting hall of mirrors.)

Exposing demonstrable hypocrisy is always good – James Franco wearing a #TimesUp pin to the Golden Globes led to his #MeToo moment – but this isn’t that. And, of course, a politician’s virtuous promises should always be fact-checked against their actual policies: Did Mr. Trudeau’s “gender-based” budget apportion enough funding to earn its sales pitch? What does the Kinder Morgan pipeline purchase do to his climate change commitments?

But virtue-signalling attacks aren’t actually about sincerity. They’re about silencing. The immediate goal, as with baseless “fake news” accusations, is to prevent the spread of messages one dislikes by discrediting the messenger. Some have even taken to dismissing street demonstrations as mere virtue signalling.

The broader aim is to redefine virtue as a vice so it reduces social pressure and so people won’t feel bad about supporting certain populist policies. In that way, it’s basically a reboot of “bleeding-heart liberal,“ a phrase that “comes from the religious image of Christ’s wounded heart, which symbolizes his compassion and love,” according to an Atlas Obscura article on its origins. But the modern usage turning Jesus-like empathy into an epithet was coined in 1937 by American newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler to discredit congressional supporters of an anti-lynching bill. (He saw it as “political bait” for black votes.)

Infamous senator Joe McCarthy would later use the term to call legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow one of the “extreme Left Wing bleeding-heart elements of television and radio.” Now considered a shameful period in U.S. politics, McCarthyism effectively ended during hearings on alleged communists in the military when the Army’s chief counsel asked the senator, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

That question still hangs in the air when people launch virtue-signalling attacks. What are they trying to signal? That we should not show compassion and love? That we should not have a sense of decency? No matter where we sit on the political spectrum during these polarized times, we need to remember what we once all knew: Virtue is good.

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