In these strange and unpredictable times, it takes a lot to surprise me. But even I was caught off-guard by a recent protest targeting Zohran Mamdani over his alleged support of Israel. When the New York City Mayor attended a vigil at Union Square to mark the three-year anniversary of October 7, hundreds showed their contempt for America’s most powerful Left-winger. “Mayor Mamdani, you can’t hide,” they chanted “We charge you with genocide!”
It’s worth underscoring that Mamdani has himself consistently described events in Gaza since 2023 as a genocide. Indeed, right after that ceremony, he met Palestinian New Yorkers at a restaurant named after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old killed in Gaza two years ago. Nor have his interventions been solely symbolic. On his first day as mayor, Mamdani revoked several executive orders signed by his predecessor, Eric Adams, including the adoption of the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism and a ban on city agencies participating in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Whatever one thinks of these moves, they were clearly significant concessions to the pro-Palestine movement. Yet parts of the radical Left, including individuals who claim to have previously campaigned for Mamdani, now oppose him with a vigour usually reserved for the extreme Right. Actually, it would be more accurate to say, with a vigour that is rarely reserved for the Right. After all, Andrew Cuomo, JD Vance and even Donald Trump himself aren’t held to account for their stances on Gaza to such a degree. And yet an elected member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who has used his platform to highlight the Palestinian cause, is considered a suitable target.
To many not on the Left, this must seem hilarious. It’s the kind of thing you would do if you wanted to lose — a set of actions so politically obnoxious and self-destructive that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to speculate about the role of bad faith or even crisis actors. But no, this is simply how a minority on the radical Left now conducts politics. What’s more, far from being an isolated phenomenon, those opposing Mamdani symbolise a powerful trend in Western activism, specifically in the Anglophone world. This transcends Left and Right: and goes by the name of “virtue hoarding”.
To be clear, virtue hoarding is distinct from “woke” — by now a meaningless phrase generally deployed by old conservatives to disparage single-origin coffee and avocado on toast. Indeed, virtue hoarding is a far more precise term: and a political style that seeks to redefine “vanguardism”. It is also distinct from the old Leninist tradition of offering leadership to the masses. Here, the point is not to win power, but rather to display an unbreachable moral superiority over the rest of society. The point is to lose.
The term virtue hoarding was coined by the cultural theorist Catherine Liu in her 2021 work Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. It’s a book that, despite its brevity, helps explain a great deal of seemingly inexplicable behaviour, not least the political peccadilloes of the professional middle class (“PMC”).
Liu describes how the desire to hoard virtue has become increasingly central to a form of managerial liberalism that emphasises bias over inequality, and visibility over exploitation. For the virtue hoarder, policies about economic deprivation and racism always circle back to enhancing their personal “sense of political agency and cultural and moral superiority”. In other words, this unspoken, often incoherent doctrine, allows powerful, credentialled individuals to feel good about themselves — all while failing to address actually-existing exploitation.
Last month, for example, the Boston Globe published an extraordinary report about an LGBT bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where the heightened moral scrutiny of the Covid pandemic seems never to have ended. The Last Ditch, facing insolvency and rising debts having only been in business a year, had recently announced it would no longer require customers to wear masks on Saturday nights, though they would remain mandatory from Monday to Friday. That post, published on the bar’s Instagram page, led to a deluge of complaints and abuse — even calls for a boycott. As one comment put it: “I hope your venue gets firebombed”.
Never mind that there have been no recorded cases of Covid in Greenfield for months, and that almost every other venue in the state stopped enforcing masks years ago. Yet just as protesters branded the most pro-Palestinian politician in America a genocide apologist, so too did mask-supporting zealots attack the one venue anywhere close to agreeing with them.
The far side of the Atlantic is facing something similar. Once you recognise the phenomenon, countless political stories become clear — on both sides of the Atlantic. In the aftermath of the recent Green Party conference, for instance, some wondered whether passing a motion that “Zionism is racism” (which won by only a few hundred votes) was a smart strategy: not least because the Greens are struggling to deal with a Labour government now led by Andy Burnham. Just when the Greens needed to address the country with bold, broadly popular policies, critics argued, they had turned inward to debate the meaning of words.
And yet, once again, it was these same people — who are on the whole entirely sympathetic to the claim that Zionism is premised on ideas of racial superiority — who stood accused of being Zionists themselves. Some of the Greens’ newer members even called for the expulsion of the likes of former leader Caroline Lucas and Green MP Adrian Ramsay: someone able to win the Greens a seat in rural East Anglia. I myself was called a Zionist! I had said I understood why some European Jews, in 1945, were attracted to the Israeli cause in the aftermath of the Holocaust. But for the virtue hoarders, of course, that signalled little more than my own moral depravity.
Of course, such behaviour isn’t entirely new, particularly on the radical fringes of politics. In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud expanded on his idea of the narcissism of small differences, where minor disagreements with those closest to you assume an outsized importance. You can see this everywhere, from intra-city football rivalries to religious sectarianism and bickering siblings. Later still, in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin offered a sociological critique, arguing that political purism is a temporary habit of the anxious middle strata — as movements mature and learn — rather than a universal psychological feature.
Both theories are arguably in evidence in the stories I outline above. All the same, it does also feel like something else is going on too, not least when it comes to the internet. This is the argument made by James Marriott in his recent book The New Dark Ages: that digital media is taking us closer to a post-literate age, whose “mystical, tribal and autocratic” characteristics feel more reminiscent of our “pre-literate past”. In the same vein, Liu sees virtue-hoarders as trying to transform all social struggles into “individual passion plays” — a phrase that might sound familiar to anyone acquainted with Instagram.
Still, it’s worth questioning whether Liu’s definition of virtue hoarding goes far enough. She observes virtue hoarding most clearly in academia and in white-collar professions. But it’s clear the habit has spread to the downwardly mobile graduates of Britain and North America. Such people are less likely to own a home than their parents and grandparents and should, in theory, be more inclined to a materialist politics.
What’s more, virtue hoarding has made movement politics functionally useless, capable at best of intermittent gains before abruptly imploding. Compare that with, say, the Bolsheviks, whose very name came from the Russian term for “majority” (a label they were canny enough to adopt even when it wasn’t strictly true). For his part, Antonio Gramsci wrote extensively about establishing a majority common sense for Left-wing ideas through cultural production, something he referred to as “hegemony”. It doesn’t matter what you think about Lenin or Gramsci: for two centuries, the Left’s chief ambition was to win over the masses. But now that’s changed.
That’s happened for two reasons. First, because vanguardism has seemingly become an end in itself. If virtue can only be hoarded so long as it is a minority position, then once mainstream opinion shifts towards you, you have to move once more. That is what is most striking about labelling Mamdani a Zionist, or declaring that Caroline Lucas should be expelled from the Green Party. It is precisely because power has made concessions, and the Left has made very real gains that the anger is directed at allies instead. If you’ve ever wondered why some on the Left can’t “take the win”, the concept of virtue hoarding should help explain why.
The second reason stems from the first. For Liu, the PMC rejects debate as a meaningful way of advancing knowledge or settling disputes. Instead, political disagreements generally assume a moral tone. As a result, the politics of virtue-hoarding proves unable to build coalitions around a minimal program — the basis for collective action and social progress. For virtue hoarders, the role of debate is instead replaced by a constant impulse to humiliate political opponents — another straightforward way to accumulate cultural currency on social media — or simply discredit their views as morally suspect because they don’t possess certain immutable characteristics.
It’s worth stating that none of this is limited to the Left, though it does remain most obvious there. Just look at the Right: no sooner had Reform stolen supporters from the Conservatives than Restore appeared to steal supporters off them. The point of Restore isn’t to win, but merely to be part of a vanguard whose prestige and sense of self-worth rests on isolation from mainstream opinion. Were Restore ever to usurp Reform as the default choice of the radical Right, you can rest assured that Rupert Lowe would be presented as a traitor to the faithful alongside Nigel Farage.
Perhaps the saddest thing in all of this is that those engaged in virtue-hoarding generally don’t recognise what they are doing. Still, there’s no doubt that they’re committed to bad politics. If you truly care about your cause succeeding, it’s worth isolating their behaviour and explaining why they’re wrong. Because when you have the virtue hoarders on your side, who needs enemies?
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