You become what you signal. | Peter Banks
So signal virtue.
I wanted to today discourse on the role that signaling plays in society, particularly the sort of game show top-down signaling that seems to dominate American political and economic life. I believe the values that a group of people pretend to care about end up becoming what they actually strive for, even if that was not the original intention. Therefore, the image we project to the world is of utmost importance. You become what you signal, so signal virtue.
Recently, Ezra Klein—one of the chief architects of the Great Awokening—has undergone a transformation that my good friend and fellow writer
described as an MtM transition.
He has ditched his t-shirt for a sports coat, his lib glasses for contacts, and grown a beard. I haven’t seen his legs, but I suspect his pants are getting baggier by the day. Give him a week and he will emerge jacked and TRT maxxing. He has paired this physical transformation with an equally substantial shift in the way he represents himself publicly. Gone is the condescension and self-assurance that defined his interaction with Sam Harris in 2018, replaced by an acknowledged epistemic uncertainty about how to actually achieve the racial and social equity objectives he has always striven for. His new book Abundance seems to be a pretty radical rejection of the "everything bagel liberalism" he would have advocated for even just a few short years ago.
Klein isn’t the only figure to make this transformation since the wheels fell off the liberal wagon in 2022.
Zuck has been, as they like to say online, looksmaxing for a while now. And just like Klein, he has also been talking differently. He went on the Joe Rogan Experience and talked about the need for more masculinity in corporate America and has also been engaging in high-profile declarations of love for his wife—including a remix of Get Low with T-Pain for his wife’s birthday and a statue of his wife in the “Roman Tradition”.
Klein and Zuckerberg are both obviously riding the downdraft of a movement that long ago passed the zenith of its cultural power. The weak metrosexual man of the 2010s is rapidly losing popularity. In part, because young men simply do not respect older men who behave like this. Although Democrats seem not to have realized this during the 2024 election:
It is easy to point out how insincere this all comes across. For years, Klein, for example, was probably the torchbearer of the intellectually serious wing of cultural progressives in the US as both a co-founder and editor of Vox. Additionally, it should be obvious to everyone that if Kamala had won in 2024, he would not be coming out so strongly against the clear and evident failures of Biden’s domestic policy or the decline in quality of life in Blue states caused by a breakdown in basic state services. But what Ezra or Zuckerberg actually believe doesn’t really matter that much. What matters far more than the internal world of our public figures is the face they want to present to the world. They now want to present one that glorifies the traditionally masculine—on both an aesthetic and behavioral level. I think this is good and should be celebrated for the substantial cultural victory that it is. Undeniably, these changes aren’t a reflection of deep inner transformation but are instead purely opportunistic. But the same can be said for the virtue signaling that swept our institutions in the 2010s and that materialized in real, substantial policy changes. Even if the CEOs and administrators never actually believed the things they were saying, their signaling shaped the direction of that decade.
I also doubt that Klein’s effort to rebrand the Democratic Party will work. As a great Substack writer, Glenn, wrote recently:
To be clear, I wish Klein and Thompson the best of luck, but they probably face an uphill battle if they want to make the Democrats the party of YIMBY and supply deregulation when the biggest Democratic constituencies are affluent white liberals who don’t want their property values to go down and social justice interest groups and unions that want to impose onerous environmental, equity, and labor standards on everything. Even if the regulations in total make everybody worse off, there’s still a collective action problem when you try to get rid of any one of them. The people they make worse off are only harmed a little bit by each rule, but the people they don’t make worse off have a huge incentive to fight you tooth and nail!
But simply signaling good policy is enough. This has become painfully clear with the Trump administration. MAGA has a remarkable ability to take literal savants and transform them into actual retards. As a person who has long held an enormous degree of admiration for Elon Musk, it is legitimately painful to watch right-wing slop on Xitter obviously rot out the inside of his brain. So far he has yet to become a raving anti-Semite; but there is still plenty of time1. Why? Because the online right signals cruelty and disinterest in the truth. As someone who would put themselves clearly to the right of the median American on almost every issue other than abortion, I don’t love having to watch the faction I should call home sink deeper and deeper into a miasma of confusion and lies simply because the pressure to signal these beliefs is so strong.
Stephen Pinker and other intellectually serious left-wingers felt very similarly about the rise of identitarian politics on the left, and I think the motivation was the same in both cases: just like intellectually honest liberals turned a blind eye to the excesses of Wokism because they were sympathetic to the very real inequality of outcomes between Whites and Blacks in this country, people on the right are correct in identifying that the media and academia are overwhelmingly dominated by progressives.
As someone inside academia right now, I actually think these numbers overcount conservatives. The truth is that there are zero people at Stanford I have met who would openly self-describe as cultural conservatives. I might be the only person at the entire GSB right now who could wear this title. This is the product of an insanely unfair system that has been captured for political ends, something I have written about before. Media is potentially worse, with most elite journalism programs being little more than bootcamps for progressive activists at this point. So the desire to counter-signal this is natural, but eventually, you just become the counter-signal. You just become the balancing lie; you don’t achieve balance.
I want to conclude with the following thought: The world is far too complex to fully process as an individual. Most of us have lives full of complexity and obligation, and few have time to actually engage with the facts. Normally, when you do, the conflicting and scattered nature of the evidence makes anything approaching strong convictions difficult to maintain. So we rely on our elites to pursue virtue for us while we go about living our own small lives. For too long, elites in this country have signaled values that are, frankly, bad. Rob Henderson has referred to these as luxury beliefs, but I think the more honest name is lies. Marriage, monogamy, loyalty, children, hard work, agency, strength, courage—all of these are good and should be celebrated. You are a better person when you more closely align with virtue, even when it makes the less virtuous feel shame and resentment. No one wants to be weak or lazy, and it is time we stopped pretending that we do. Because many young people will use these false virtues as an excuse to rot, trapping themselves in a lifestyle that makes them deeply unhappy. They may even develop a disability simply to conform to the conception of good you have presented to them.
It is totally unclear where Klein’s new project will land or if Zuck will suddenly divorce his wife, but I for one am happy Klein has grown a beard and Zuck is talking about hetero love. Conversely, where this Trump administration will end up is totally unclear, but they have power now, and the era of vice signaling to counterbalance liberals has passed. They need to begin to signal honesty and virtue or continue sinking into the swamp they stand knee-deep in already.
I unironically fear that his most recent baby mama - who happens to be Jewish and insane - is a legitimate risk vector. History turns on such trivia much to the frustration of the Historical Materialist.
So, I am admittedly a bit of an Ezra Klein fan, but I feel this reads slightly unfair when lumping him in with Musk/Zuckerberg. When I think about Musk/Zuckerberg, they really do feel like they’d say anything for the grift and to remain in the good graces of the party in power. I agree with you.
Klein? Not so much. I think the one large datapoint that seems to wreck your theory is that Ezra Klein came out in February saying Joe Biden was looking old and needed to change the campaign/step down. This was a BOLD statement, and generated a ton of intra-party vitriol against him.
While there are elements of this piece I find persuasive, it’s hard to square the narrative of Klein as a squishy yes man with his bold stance during the campaign.
"Additionally, it should be obvious to everyone that if Kamala had won in 2024, he would not be coming out so strongly against the clear and evident failures of Biden’s domestic policy or the decline in quality of life in Blue states caused by a breakdown in basic state services."
Abundance was definitely written before the results of the election were known, and he makes those strong critiques throughout that book. Your claim is almost certainly just false here, unless you're referring to even stronger statements that aren't covered by the book.