This week, voters tired of politicians who are immune to embarrassment.
This week, voters tired of politicians who are immune to embarrassment.
I n The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois offered his explanation for why Reconstruction was fraught with violence against blacks. “The greatest deterrent to crime, the public opinion of one’s own social caste, was lost,” he wrote, so “the criminal was looked upon as crucified rather than hanged.”
The ultimate deterrent to terrible behavior, he suggested, is shame, whether produced internally by one’s conscience or externally by the condemnation of one’s peers.
Shame has ceased to be a meaningful factor in American politics, where cruelty, dishonesty, and vengeance on the part of elected officials have become habits. For a decade, feeling shame has been seen as a weakness, and apologies have all but disappeared from the landscape.
Yet on Tuesday night, America began to deploy antibodies to fight off the creeping disease of shamelessness. Ken Paxton, perhaps the most corrupt major candidate to run for U.S. Senate in decades, lost to Democrat James Talarico in Texas. Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran a loathsome television advertisement using his opponent’s estranged mother to attack her — a woman who lost custody of her daughter after her husband raped the girl when she was twelve years old — also lost in his quest to become governor of Ohio. Good riddance.
Clearly, the public has decided it has had enough of the win-at-all-costs brand of politicking that has coarsened our daily interactions.
In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains how societies need shame to function: “The most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.”
Yet there is a lot of money and attention to be found in breaking the machine in order to fix it. Shameless behavior creates conflict, which for political hangers-on creates opportunities for profit. It’s like the movie where Charlie Chaplin hires a kid to smash windows and then offers the aggrieved resident his window-repair services.
In our politics, someone seeking the office of vice president can falsely claim that immigrants are prowling Ohio eating their neighbors’ pets, then offer no apology when caught in the lie. A Homeland Security secretary can tarnish the reputation of a man murdered by ICE agents as a “domestic terrorist” and stand by that assertion even after video shows he was simply protesting her policies.
The political left noticed the opportunity for profit in shamelessness and decided to jump in with both feet. Raving mobs came for university professors who dared express their beliefs about transgenderism or DEI initiatives. Democratic politicians argued with a straight face that their nominee for the presidency in 2024 wasn’t catatonic, despite what every voter could see. And after Joe Biden’s bid collapsed, he offered a presidential pardon to his son — something any president with a sense of personal shame would have avoided, and which Biden himself said he would never do.
But the internet age of the 2010s brought about “the overuse of shame as a weapon,” as Jon Ronson writes in his book The Castle. “As a consequence . . . , transgressors hardened. They mutated like hospital superbugs . . . until they became impervious to treatment.” The cancelers cried wolf, and people stopped listening: “Refusing to feel ashamed was healthy if the shaming had been inappropriate, but people started brushing the shame off no matter the seriousness of their wrongdoing.” Being shamed turned into a badge of honor.
This is how American politics ended up being infected with scofflaws like George Santos, who was less than three months into a seven-year prison term when President Trump commuted it, calling him “somewhat of a rogue.” Trump praised his loyalty, saying that Santos had the “Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” So much for the belief that remorse for wrongdoing should be encouraged.
But, of course, Trump’s shamelessness is now part of America’s historical record. Former Congressman Justin Amash, speaking to journalist Tim Alberta, summed it up best: “Trump is one of a kind — you can’t replicate what he’s doing. It requires you to not feel shame . . . it gives him a superpower that other people don’t have.”
But just because Trump can’t be copied doesn’t mean that mini-Trumps haven’t tried. Both political parties now try to scam elderly people for political donations, scaring them into emptying their bank accounts. Representative Derrick Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican who lost on Tuesday, spent much of his tenure screaming at Senate pages and accused a fellow congressman of running around naked in Europe with a sex toy taped to a stick.
Just this week, JD Vance workshopped a baseless conspiracy theory alleging that Somali immigrants in Ohio were attempting to steal that state’s elections. Do not expect any apology to be forthcoming. (Vance also said he was “disgusted” by those pushing back against Ramaswamy’s despicable TV ad.)
Historian Gordon Wood wrote that George Washington “judged all his actions by what people might think of them,” which “sometimes makes him seem silly to modern minds.” The Founders’ “intense self-conscious seriousness” about virtue, he wrote, “is what ultimately separates them from later generations of American leaders.”
Given the drubbing handed to Republicans by voters on Tuesday, it looks like Americans want that separation to be much smaller. They are seeking more serious people who actually believe things, rather than cretins who are immune to public humiliation. It is a shame it hasn’t happened sooner.