The Signaler-in-Chief
The feedback loop between false signals and false leaders
A man walks into the Four Seasons in a ragged flannel shirt. Another walks into a Best Western wearing a Rolex. We might call the first humble and the second flashy, but that misses what’s actually happening. Both are signaling. The flannel says “I’m so wealthy I don’t need to dress the part.” The Rolex says “I’m successful even if my surroundings don’t reflect it.” Neither is more authentic than the other. Both are performances calibrated to an audience.
I don’t think this is a problem. Humans signal. We always have. The question is whether we know we’re doing it. Some of us are aware of our performances and make peace with them. Some deny they’re performing at all, which is cause for introspection. Some genuinely don’t care how they’re perceived and just wear what’s comfortable (though this is rarer than we like to think).
But there’s a fourth category that’s become dominant in public life: people who have become so skilled at signaling that they’ve lost the capacity to do anything else. People whose entire competence lies in reading the room and delivering what the room wants to hear.
We’ve started electing these people. And then we wonder why they can’t govern.
Keir Starmer won a landslide in July 2024. By December, his approval rating had collapsed to 18% favorable, 72% unfavorable. That’s roughly where Boris Johnson sat on his resignation day. A historic victory evaporated in months.
What happened?
Watch the mechanism. In 2020, Starmer needed left-wing Labour members to win the party leadership. So he published ten pledges: abolish tuition fees, nationalize rail and utilities, defend free movement with the EU, raise taxes on the top 5%, end the “cruel” two-child benefit cap. He positioned himself as Jeremy Corbyn’s natural heir, promising to “maintain our radical values.”
He won the leadership.
Then he needed media support and centrist votes to win the general election. So he abandoned every pledge. Tuition fees rose. Nationalization plans were attacked as “Corbyn-style” overreach. Free movement was ruled out; he started using “take back control,” the Brexit slogan he’d spent years opposing. The two-child cap remained; he suspended seven Labour MPs who voted against it.
Two audiences. Two sets of signals. Zero continuity of substance.
The Gaza example shows the pattern even more starkly. In October 2023, Starmer said Israel had the “right” to cut off water and electricity to Gaza. He called a ceasefire something that would “embolden” Hamas. When 56 Labour MPs defied him to vote for a ceasefire, he sacked ten frontbenchers rather than shift position. Then, once the political winds changed, he shifted. By February 2024, he was demanding the “fighting must stop now.” He adopted the position he’d punished others for holding, and acted as though it had been his view all along.
His skill is reading the room. That skill got him the job. But governing requires a different skill: making decisions that disappoint people, absorbing unpopularity for necessary choices, holding a position even when the room turns against you. Starmer has cycled through four directors of communications in nineteen months. The tool that works for acquiring power breaks when you try to use it for wielding power.
Same mechanism, different costume
The pattern isn’t confined to the British left.
In 2016, JD Vance called Donald Trump “America’s Hitler.” He wrote that Trump’s promises were “the needle in America’s collective vein,” that Trump was “cultural heroin.” He called him “reprehensible” for his rhetoric on immigrants and Muslims. He described himself as “a Never Trump guy” and reportedly voted for Evan McMullin rather than cast a ballot for Trump.
By 2022, Vance was running for Senate in Ohio. He deleted the critical tweets. He apologized publicly: “I regret being wrong about the guy.” He became, in the words of reporters covering him, “one of Trump’s fiercest defenders.” In 2024, Trump selected him as his running mate.
Vance’s explanation for the reversal is that he “bought into media lies” about Trump. This requires believing that he was completely deceived about a man’s character in 2016, then completely correct by 2022, with the timing of his enlightenment perfectly matching his political ambitions. The simpler explanation: the room changed, and Vance adjusted his signal accordingly. I don’t know what Vance actually believes. I’m not sure he does either.
The content differs entirely from Starmer. One is British Labour, courting progressives then abandoning them. One is American right-wing, opposing Trump then embracing him. But the mechanism is identical. Both men read their respective rooms with precision. Both delivered whatever signals would advance them with whichever audience they needed at that moment. Both are fluent in the language of conviction without the inconvenience of actual convictions.
Vance hasn’t been tested by governance yet — Starmer has. The results aren’t encouraging.
We might want to blame the politicians. But Starmer and Vance didn’t emerge from nowhere. They were selected. Someone selected them.
We did.
But the selection isn’t just bad judgment. It’s structural. Neil Postman observed that the medium shapes what kind of person can succeed within it. Print culture could reward the deliberator: someone who builds an argument across paragraphs, tolerates complexity, changes minds through sustained reasoning. Performance media cannot. The camera demands presence, timing, the compression of everything into moments. A politician who pauses to think looks weak. One who says “it’s complicated” looks evasive. The medium eliminates the deliberator from the pool, because deliberation on camera is indistinguishable from hesitation.
What the system produces instead is what Daniel Boorstin called the human pseudo-event: a figure whose public image exists for media consumption, skilled primarily at appearing skilled. The celebrity replacing the hero. Starmer’s ten pledges weren’t convictions communicated through media. They were performances calibrated to the medium carrying them. So was Vance’s reversal.
The genuine article (someone who knows what they think, says it clearly, holds the position even when costly) is at a disadvantage in this system. They’ll say the wrong thing. They’ll refuse to pivot when the room shifts. They’ll accumulate enemies by standing for something specific.
The signalers, meanwhile, glide upward. They read every room correctly. They never alienate anyone permanently because they never commit to anything permanently. They seem like leaders right up until the moment leadership is required.
We vote the way they campaign
But the problem runs deeper than who gets elected. What Timur Kuran called preference falsification (saying what we think we’re supposed to believe until we forget what we actually believed) doesn’t stop at conversation. We don’t just tell pollsters what sounds good while believing something different. We do it at the ballot box. We cast votes that make us feel like good people rather than votes that reflect our judgment. We signal with our votes the same way Starmer signals with his pledges.
Think about how often political opinions are expressed not as reasoning but as identity markers. “I could never vote for X” functions less as policy analysis and more as tribal declaration: I am the kind of person who would never do that. The vote becomes a performance of virtue rather than an expression of preference. And once voting becomes signaling, the system dutifully produces candidates who are excellent at receiving signals and reflecting them back.
There are exceptions. Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times and absorbed years of professional and social cost for expressing heterodox views. J.K. Rowling has spent half a decade as a target for voicing positions on gender that, polls suggest, most people privately share but few will publicly defend. Bill Maher has been telling the same jokes for thirty years and watched himself migrate from liberal provocateur to something the left now codes as conservative, without changing many positions. That all three names register as “right-coded” says more about the drift than about them. These are people who broke from the hall of mirrors, who stopped falsifying their preferences and accepted the consequences.
Most of us won’t do this. I understand why. The cost is real. I feel the pull myself: the temptation to express the acceptable view, to vote the way that won’t require explanation at dinner parties, to signal membership in the right tribe rather than voice the judgment forming in my own mind. Signaling is comfortable. Conviction is expensive.
And the corruption runs in both directions. Falsified preferences produce signalers. Those signalers reinforce which preferences it’s safe to express. Starmer’s pledge reversals taught Labour members what convictions actually cost. Vance’s reversal taught Republican aspirants what loyalty requires. Each cycle narrows the range of expressible belief, which narrows the range of viable candidates, which narrows further still.
What would happen if we voted the way we actually believe? Not the view that makes us feel virtuous. Not the tribal declaration. The judgment we’d express if no one were watching.
If we keep selecting signalers (and we keep selecting them because we vote as signalers ourselves) we’ll keep getting governments that perform rather than govern. The feedback loop is tight: we falsify our preferences, the system reads our falsified preferences, and it produces leaders optimized for the false signal rather than the true one.
Every signal we send, the system receives. It is listening very carefully.