The Shame Wars

If you pay attention to Twitter or Facebook rants, angry letters to the editor, and the many strident voices that make headlines, the message comes through loud and clear.

Somebody somewhere ought to feel ashamed of themselves!

Not a day goes by without someone telling someone else that they should be ashamed. City officials in Kenosha should be ashamed of their public restrooms. Editors at the Durango Herald should be ashamed of posting fire scene photos taken by drones on their website, the author who wrote about gender transition regret in The Atlantic should be ashamed of herself.

Last weekend, the Twittersphere lit up with outrage about The Red Hen incident, and liberal and conservative partisans alike insisted that someone on the other side ought to ashamed. Some Tweeters insisted that the owner of The Red Hen should be ashamed of refusing service to Sarah Sanders, while others held that the Press Secretary herself is the one who ought to feel ashamed. Maxine Waters should be ashamed of herself for encouraging people to “bully” their opponents. Mike Huckabee ought to feel ashamed of trying to distinguish The Red Hen affair from the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.

Shame has become a favored weapon in the political wars currently raging in our country as each side tries to humiliate the other, but shame didn’t always divide us so. On the contrary, societies everywhere have historically made use of shame to deter harmful behavior and to encourage conformity to shared values. As recent studies have shown, human beings evolved the capacity to feel shame over the long millennia when we lived in small tribes. Shame served as a means of promoting obedience to the rules that helped humans live and survive together; it deterred actions that might harm the individual as well as the tribe.

By shaming an offender, the tribe encouraged him or her to bring deviant behavior back into alignment with tribal values and expectations. Modern societies still do the same thing to some extent – consider the way we shame deadbeat dads, for instance. But more and more, we use shame to draw a line between us and them. We employ shame to mark our territory and define our own tribe as distinct from the enemy, that other tribe over there whose members are nothing like us.

In recent times, it has become cliché to describe modern American politics as increasingly tribal. In one recent article in the Washington Post, for example, historian Jon Meacham is quoted saying he cannot recall a “similarly tribal moment” in recent history. “We’re kind of back to the Colonial era in terms of public shaming, with virtual and symbolic stocks in the public square rather than literal ones.”

But another historian, Lawrence Friedman, holds that the use of public humiliation in Colonial America was actually intended to teach offenders a lesson, and to encourage their desire to return and find acceptance within the tribe. This is sometimes referred to as reintegrative shaming, in contrast to stigmatization, which ostracizes and permanently excludes the offender from full membership in society.

At this particular moment in our history, partisans on both the Left and the Right all too often strive to stigmatize and shun the other side. For a time, it seemed as if Democrats held the higher ground – remember “When they go low, we go high”? But in the wake of the border crisis, their tactics seem to have shifted. Protesters confront Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in front of a Tampa movie theater, crying “Shame on you!” and “You are a horrible person!” Hecklers shout “Shame!” at Security Advisor Kirstjen Nielsen as she dines at a DC restaurant. Both sides in this political war seem to have adopted public shaming as their preferred weapon and neither one will give quarter.

This type of stigmatizing aims to dehumanize those “others,” to place them beyond the pale and exclude them from membership in society. No one has employed this tactic more effectively than Donald J. Trump, whom Adam Haslett, writing for The Nation, once dubbed the “Shamer in Chief.” With contempt, scorn, and hatred for his opponents, he daily gins up his tribe and mobilizes them against the enemy.

Now it seems the Left has decided to fight with fire, insulting and denigrating members of the opposing tribe. Robert De Niro publicly curses the President during the Tony Awards ceremony and gets a standing ovation. Samantha Bee uses vulgar language to describe the President’s daughter. And then there is Maxine Waters’ call to arms. While this type of public shaming most definitely delivers a message to the offender, it excludes the possibility of reconciliation.

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At this political moment, we’re engaged in an escalating tit-for-tat shame war, each side mobilizing contempt and dehumanizing the other in an intensifying cycle. How are we to escape from this depressing impasse? Neither side can win these shame wars, not unless our country falls apart.

To move forward, we have to find common ground, and that might begin by recognizing how much we all suffer from this toxic atmosphere infused with shame. None of us is immune. Either we “find a way to acknowledge together what we suffer in common,” as Adam Haslett puts it, or the shame wars intensify and ever more ugly forms of violence continue to erupt.

As noted shame researcher Brené Brown tells us, “Empathy is the antidote to shame.” Only when we declare a truce and begin to feel how much we’re all suffering together in these shame wars can we begin to find our way forward. Maybe then we might identify some shared values such as compassion, respect and – yes – civility, agreeing that people who refuse to respect those values are the ones who truly ought to be ashamed.