A BLEEDING-HEART LIBERTARIAN IN AMERICA'S DAIRYLAND
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By John Adams in These Days Before the Vote —

These Days Before the Vote: "Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government."

These Days Before the Vote: "Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government."

Whitewater, Wis. — Today’s entry this rainy Thursday morning continues These Days Before the Vote, a series addressing each day before the November election a principle or position on which our liberal democratic tradition rests.

In his 1796 Farewell Address, Washington observed that "virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government." Centuries later, MAGA — an authoritarian populist movement — dismisses the call to virtue or morality as mere virtue signaling. In the language of our time, the authoritarian populists claim that appeals to virtue are merely performative, and a century ago they would have called these appeals dumb show. For Washington, more than a century before that, such dismissals would have seemed an utter inversion of principles.

(On climate science, for example, MAGA derides steps toward mitigation of climate change as virtue signaling. See The White House, On Earth Day, We Finally Have a President Who Follows Science (Apr. 22, 2025) (where mitigation efforts are called "virtue signaling" and "expensive grifts").)

Of expensive grifts in particular, the Trump accusation is more like a projected confession.

If MAGA and authoritarian populism have rejected an enunciation and performance of principles of virtue, they have not done so without supplying a substitute. They've their own version: discarding virtue signaling for the darker opposite of vice signaling. See K. Thor Jensen, Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump And The Power Of “Vice Signaling,” Medium, March 30, 2018 and David Gilbert, A New Theory of Right-Wing Communication: “Vice Signaling,” LinkedIn, November 18, 2018.

In the signal to vice, Trump is without parallel among prior American chief executives. See from Center for American Progress Action, Donald Trump’s Hate Timeline, March 2, 2016:

Trump launched his campaign by smearing people coming from Mexico as drug runners, violent criminals, and rapists. He questioned whether voters could elect GOP rival Carly Fiorina because of her face. He persisted in the false claim that thousands in New Jersey cheered the September 11 attacks. At a Miami event, Trump told the crowd that he would be more violent toward future groups of protesters. He mocked a man being removed from a rally as seriously overweight (that is, Trump mocked someone else for being overweight). He called for a complete prohibition on Muslims entering the United States.

Trump has displayed a virulent misogyny throughout his career. See from Rafi Schwartz & Jeva Lange, 81 Things Donald Trump Has Said About Women, The Week, May 26, 2026:

Claiming Kamala Harris was mentally impaired. Describing Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as a low-IQ person who somehow reached the bench. Denigrating reporter Katie Rogers's appearance, calling her ugly inside and out. Telling reporter Catherine Lucey “Quiet, piggy,” when she questioned him.

There are few groups Trump has denigrated more than immigrants. See from Fact-Checking Over 12,000 of Donald Trump’s Quotes About Immigrants, The Marshall Project, Oct. 21, 2024:

Depicting immigrants as snakes. In a 2024 presidential debate, he repeated the baseless accusation that Haitian migrants were eating residents’ pets. Trump has asserted without evidence that people behind the October 7 attack on Israel were coming through the U.S. southern border.

Trump has claimed that people entering unlawfully were "poisoning the blood of our country," promised to "root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country," and said that people crossing unlawfully were "[i]n some cases they're not people, in my opinion....But I'm not allowed to say that because the radical Left says that's a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it." See Gram Slattery, “Bloodbath,” “Vermin,” “Animals”: Trump’s Rhetoric on the Trail, Reuters, March 22, 2024.

This reminds of nothing so much as an antagonist's declaration in Paradise Lost:

Farewell remorse! All good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my Good...

John Milton, Paradise Lost bk. IV, ll. 108–13 (1674), Academy of American Poets.

When virtue signaling disappears, something worse fills the void.

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These Days Before the Vote: "Now, this means that our government, national and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests."

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