There is a peculiar irony at the heart of contemporary progressive politics: the movement most loudly opposed to capitalism has become one of its most profitable product lines.
Walk into any major Australian bookshop and you will find prominent displays of titles about racism, gender, colonialism, and privilege — selling briskly at $35 a copy. Open Instagram and you will find influencers monetising their identities as members of marginalised groups, building personal brands on the currency of lived experience. Turn on Netflix and you will find a streaming giant worth hundreds of billions of dollars producing content that positions itself as revolutionary social commentary.
None of this is necessarily hypocritical or dishonest. But it is worth asking what it means for a set of political ideas when those ideas become a consumer product.
The Genuine Tradition
Progressive politics has a long and serious intellectual tradition. The campaigns for Aboriginal rights, women’s suffrage, workers’ protections, and LGBTQ+ equality in Australia were fought by people who risked real costs — social ostracism, legal sanction, physical violence — for principles they believed in.
That tradition deserves respect, and it continues to produce important activism and scholarship. The movement for Indigenous rights, the campaign for marriage equality, and the ongoing work of domestic violence prevention are all examples of progressive politics at its best — principled, evidence-based, and focused on concrete outcomes for real people.
The Problem with Performative Progressivism
What has emerged alongside this genuine tradition is something different: a form of politics in which the primary goal is not to change material conditions for disadvantaged people, but to signal virtue to one’s peer group. This performative progressivism has several characteristic features.
It prioritises language over outcomes. Extensive energy is devoted to policing terminology, enforcing correct pronouns and preferred nomenclature, and treating linguistic violations as serious moral failures — while the actual material conditions of disadvantaged groups (housing, employment, health outcomes) receive comparatively less attention.
It prioritises the feelings of its practitioners over the needs of the people it purports to represent. The white progressive who is devastated by racism has their devastation centred; the Indigenous person navigating actual discrimination in the housing market has their practical problem treated as secondary to the psychological needs of their allies.
It is, in the end, a consumer product. You can buy your politics from the right shelf, post the right content, say the right words, and feel you have done something meaningful — without any of the difficult, unglamorous work of actually building power or changing institutions.
Why This Matters
Performative progressivism matters because it provides the far right with its most effective recruiting tool. When ordinary Australians encounter progressive politics primarily in its most performative and intolerant forms — in workplace diversity training that treats them as suspects, in social media pile-ons over linguistic missteps, in an apparent hierarchy of grievances in which their own concerns are dismissed as evidence of privilege — they are pushed toward the opposite extreme.
The best response to performative progressivism is not to abandon progressive values. It is to hold those values more seriously — to insist that politics be about outcomes, not aesthetics, and that solidarity be judged by material results rather than the sophistication of one’s terminology.
