Virtue Signaling, or … Why Clinton is in Trouble

Democratic elites are publicly condemning Trump with passion while privately acting in ways that protect only themselves. The speeches, the fact-checks, the op-eds, the outrage are all designed to signal virtue to their own tribe, not to win. In a close election where turnout is everything, this gap between performance and action threatens to unravel the very campaign these signals are meant to support.

•        Endorsements of Clinton read like insults. The LA Times calls her "pragmatic" and the New York Times notes her "reversals" while crediting her arrival at "the right position." Even her own media allies can't muster genuine enthusiasm, only reassurance that she's the lesser evil.

•        Public outrage has become a substitute for actual campaign work. Expensive TV ads run in states Clinton will win easily, not in swing states where the election is decided. The real purpose is letting supporters and donors feel good about themselves, not changing votes.

•        This is game theory in action. When the better team starts losing, players stop thinking about team victory and start thinking about their own survival. They defect not by quitting, but by signaling to others that they're on the right side.

•        Virtue signaling is contagious and nearly impossible to stop. The immediate psychic reward of tweeting outrage or writing a blistering op-ed is more powerful than the distant goal of turning out voters in North Carolina. The rewards come instantly from your tribe; consequences for losing are abstract.

•        If Clinton were a quarterback, nobody would sell out for her. In sports, "selling out" means total commitment to winning, even when it's embarrassing. Hunt sees no one willing to make that sacrifice for Clinton, which in a tight game means serious trouble ahead.

There’s a moment in every game of this unexpected type — the upset in the making — when the individual players on the better team (call them the status quo team) begin to doubt. They feel the game slipping away, even though they know that they’re the better team. What happens to many players in that moment of doubt is, to use the game theoretic phrase, they decide to defect. It doesn’t mean that they quit. It doesn’t mean that they give up. In fact, without exception, they all believe that their team will still prevail. But they start to think about what a loss, however improbable, would mean for their personal, individual goals. They never even entertained those thoughts at the beginning of the game. It was all about the team, and a team victory would naturally go hand in hand with personal development and personal goals. But now … now that the unthinkable is suddenly thinkable … they start acting directly in favor of their own self-interest, not the team’s communal interest. They start signaling their virtue.

Virtue signaling is a behavior that visibly demonstrates the individual qualities of the player to some external audience, whether or not it improves the chances of the team to win. It’s not overtly detrimental to the team. In fact, for all outward appearances it’s rather supportive of the team. But it makes all the difference in the world if an offensive lineman is more concerned with making HIS block than protecting the quarterback no matter what. It makes all the difference in the world if a shooting guard is more concerned with meeting HIS scoring average than playing team defense. It makes all the difference in the world if a Democratic Party functionary is more concerned with tweeting HIS outrage at the latest nonsense that Trump is spouting than in volunteering for a get-out-the-vote effort in Greensboro, North Carolina.