Read on Twitter
It’s almost as if we’re now seeing exactly where the sneering dismissal of any statement of basic ethics and justice as “virtue signalling” ends up. https://twitter.com/florencehrs/status/1319685666003947521
It’s hideous (and yet entirely predictable) that the government apparently don’t care about child hunger and poverty, but it’s especially unpleasant in my view that they’ve conducted this debate almost entirely within the framework of “the culture wars.”
And I think how we got here is a really pertinent question. Because it wasn’t just the tories deriding “twitter activism” and “virtue signalling” and “social justice warriors” whenever someone tried to make a reasonable point about equality via an online platform.
This honestly seems to me to be the natural end point of the so called culture wars: that everything, from child poverty to racial justice to the collapse of social care, is presented as a difference of opinion and culture cynically weaponised by “the left”.
To put it another way: a deeply cynical project to shift all issues of justice, economic survival, basic dignity etc outside the sphere of supposedly “practical” “realist” politics so that they can be dismissed as mere wishy washy idealism...
...has resulted in a situation where the implication is that all politics is now outside the sphere of politics and can be dismissed as political.
Meanwhile the utter horror show of continually suggesting that people upset about the suffering of others are merely “performing” their distress for the benefit of an online audience has meant that even a campaign to feed children can be dismissed as performative.
