This phenomenon wherein individuals or collectives adorned in the rhetoric and symbology of “progressive” thought exhibit a deficit in authentic concern for others’ well-being can be anatomized through several intersecting lenses where the visage of progressivism and the donning of progressive identity markers often veil a disconcerting void of genuine altruistic praxis.

Modern progressivism, in many instances, has been reduced to an aesthetic, a performative habitus, rather than a robust, principled ethic. It is increasingly mediated through the algorithms of digital culture, where performative signaling tweets, hashtags, curated identities eclipses actual ethical labor or sacrificial solidarity. This aestheticization dilutes progressivism into a simulacrum: outwardly evocative of justice, yet inwardly divorced from it.

While intersectionality was born as a radical analytical tool to understand compounded oppression, it has in many social arenas become commodified used as capital in social hierarchies. People may adopt identities (racial, gendered, sexual, neurodivergent) not as sites of solidarity but as tokens of credibility. The result is competitive victimhood rather than empathetic mutuality.