Why Shame No Longer Works in American Politics

Táíwò’s critique of Klein is powerful and, in many respects, correct. Klein’s airy dismissal of shame reflects a shallow and myopic commitment to the fantasy of perpetual centrist reasonableness. He clings to civility, debate, and rational persuasion as if these tools remain politically viable in an era defined by deliberate disinformation and authoritarian escalation. Klein’s position disregards the Overton window entirely: By treating “reasonableness” as a timeless, universal value, he ignores the ways his self-congratulatory centrism has become structurally complicit with the rise of fascism—even as it proves to be a great way to earn a living. While political violence surges and far-right movements openly target vulnerable groups with violence, Klein counsels decorum. It’s a convenient brand of others-sacrificing naïveté dressed up as moral sophistication.

And yet Táíwò’s own position misses something fundamental about the world we now inhabit. Shame does not operate in a vacuum. It depends on cultural and psychic structures that make it meaningful—shared symbolic coordinates, common moral horizons, and broadly accepted authorities that can confer legitimacy on judgments of behavior. In earlier periods of liberal modernity, those structures, however contested, still exerted a stabilizing force. But today, the sturdy ground that once formed shame’s foundation has collapsed.

Psychoanalytic theory helps illuminate what’s changed. In the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s account, shame arises at the intersection of two registers of psychic and social life. On the one hand, it is rooted in what Lacan calls the imaginary: the experience of seeing oneself exposed before the gaze of the Other, of recognizing one’s own insufficiency or failure. This is the affective, narcissistic dimension of shame—what happens in the psyche when the mirror cracks, when the ego or image one maintains of oneself proves to be a lie. But for shame to take hold socially, to shape collective behavior, it must be mediated by the symbolic: the shared network of language, law, and authority that tells us what counts as right or wrong, honorable or shameful. The feeling of shame originates in the imaginary, but its binding force in a society depends upon the symbolic that mediates its significance.