Meaning of vice signalling | Babel Free

Definitions

The practice of expressing a particular opinion or performing a particular action that is immoral, hateful, or cruel, but popular with the social group one is signalling to, to signal allegiance to or seek popularity with that group.

uncountable

Examples

“He [Pruitt] is famously obsessed with secrecy (his guards followed him even within the EPA building, as though he were Darth Vader), so the fact that his indiscretions were so indiscreet makes them seem deliberate. One explanation is that he was vice-signalling, trying to prove his Trumpiness to Trump himself. The plan backfired – Pruitt was forced to resign – but he got some of it right in the process. For one thing, he understood the essential pettiness of Trumpism.”

“Ostracism from mainstream opinion is one of the grounds which the alt-Right presents for wearing racism as a defiant badge of pride. Trump's equivalent instinct is towards anti-political correctness. A way of relating these behaviours is to say that they are, in common, exercises in appropriating victim status by means of engaging in a particular kind of 'vice-signalling'. Yet, ultimately, perhaps both should be seen as augmentations of the contemporary capital of identity politics, although in variant directions. Trump's discourse provokes and needles, as the alt-Right's discourses do[…]”

“At the extreme, it's a system that has elevated cruelty to the ranks of a political virtue and a political asset. One Financial Times article picked up on the idea of 'virtue signalling' and pointed to the growing practice of 'vice signalling', announcing cruel policies (like the UK's extraordinary callous and expensive sending of asylum applicants to Rwanda) that signal toughness with little chance of impacting the problem they claim to be addressing.”

“For quotations using this term, see Citations:vice signalling.”

CEFR level