The various reactions to Charlie Kirk’s murder expose something both unsettling and defining about our political era: Shame is gone for good. Like his ally Donald Trump, Kirk was a far-right provocateur who spent years targeting vulnerable groups and helping to build a movement that has openly embraced authoritarian violence. He should be a figure whose legacy inspires universal moral condemnation. Instead, prominent commentators—from far-right figures to liberal magazines—have strained to portray him as a legitimate political actor and courageous, principled debater. The refusal to name Kirk’s tawdry legacy for what it is exposes a defining feature of our so-called post-truth political world and why the form of fascism now rising across the United States is of a fundamentally different nature than fascisms of times past: The cultural foundations that once gave shame its meaning and power have collapsed.
Shame nonetheless remains at the center of political discourse. The philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, for example, recently defended shame in the Boston Review as a crucial social force; a moral glue that once held the fabric of liberal society together. Responding to New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s claim—made in the process of celebrating Charlie Kirk after his death—that we cannot live together on the basis of “social shame and cultural pressure,” Táíwò countered that shame is not only a legitimate and laudable political affect but also a necessary one for the possibility of a democratic society. It helps enforce the minimal ethical norms that allow plural societies to function without resorting to violence. Táíwò thus argues that, in the face of the erosion of democratic norms and rules under Trump, we should devote ourselves to revitalizing shame as a key tool with which to combat growing violence.
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.
For much of the modern era, this symbolic mediation was anchored by what Lacan called the “Name-of-the-Father.” This is not the literal father, but the fantasy of a paternal authority that stabilizes meaning and guarantees the law. This paternal function structured the symbolic order by defining what was real, true, and legitimate. It was reinforced by institutions like the state, the church, the university, the press, and the family. Shame worked because there was a shared, if hierarchical, moral universe in which judgments had weight.
But that world has been unraveling for decades. Neoliberal political and economic transformations hollowed out the institutions that sustained our capacity to rely upon and trust in the paternal order. Unions were crushed, social welfare, upon which the state’s sometimes function as a benevolent father-like figure depended, was gutted, knowledge-producing institutions were privatized or undermined, and public life was financialized and increasingly left to the wolves of the market rather than the protective paternalism of planners, regulators, or elected representatives. Amid these shifts, cultural authority fragmented, truth became increasingly contested, and the paternal function could no longer be sustained—now too transparently a fantasy to exercise its traditional cultural force.
The Trump era merely exposed and accelerated a process that was already well underway. We now live in something closer to what we would call a state of generalized psychosis: a social landscape where symbolic authority has fractured, shared reality is unstable, and appeals to common norms routinely fail to hold any weight.
In this environment, shame has lost its footing. Táíwò is right that shame once provided a kind of moral infrastructure. But that infrastructure no longer exists. The idea that we can revive shame as a stabilizing political force assumes we are still living in a neurotic society—one governed by shared prohibitions, pervasive anxieties around transgressing them, and a coherent symbolic order. In fact, we inhabit a fragmented, post-paternal landscape in which shame circulates as free-floating humiliation or weaponized cruelty rather than as a mechanism of moral regulation. Social media platforms are engines of shame, but not of shared ethical life.
It’s important, though, not to romanticize the world that came before. The paternal symbolic order was never simply benevolent. It sustained patriarchal norms that pathologized difference and targeted it for violence. Shame, even when it “worked,” often did so by cultivating hostility toward those who deviated from dominant norms—queer and disabled people, racialized minorities, dissidents—rather than by fostering a universal commitment to protecting a right to individual difference and cultivating collective support for this. Liberal ideals of civility and rational discourse similarly masked the violences that structured the social order: colonial exploitation, racial terror, gendered domination. One of the big reasons that the moral glue that held society together was so adhesive was that it so often excluded others.
These parallel, if superficially opposed, movements—nostalgia for a fantasy of civil debate from liberals like Klein, and nostalgia for political shame from Táíwò—thus miss the deeper transformation at hand. Klein’s faith in debate and persuasion presupposes shared symbolic coordinates that no longer exist. Táíwò’s faith in shame presupposes a paternal authority that has disintegrated. Both are, in different ways, fighting the last war.
Meanwhile, contemporary fascism thrives precisely in the terrain opened up by symbolic collapse. Trumpian authoritarianism is not, as many have claimed, a return to classical fascism organized around the figure of the paternal Führer ruling over a primal horde. It is something more chaotic and insidious: a politics that affirms and intensifies the fracture of shared reality. Trump doesn’t stabilize meaning; he floods the zone with nonsense, weaponizes overwhelming and untethered affect by channeling it into cruelty and violence, and turns politics into a spectacular theater of the imaginary. His power grows not by reinstating symbolic order but by further dismantling it, leaving opponents flailing as they attempt to deploy tools—fact-checking, rational debate, appeals to civility, anachronistic insistence that noxious political actors should be ashamed of themselves—that depend on symbolic conditions that no longer hold.
This is why familiar forms of resistance, such as those to which impotent Democratic Party leadership continues to cling, are falling flat. You cannot shame people who no longer recognize the legitimacy of shared norms. You cannot debate authoritarians into submission when language itself is treated as a game without stakes. You cannot appeal to civility when the entire political project of the far right is to revel in transgression and humiliation. These are not exceptions or pathologies at the margins; they are central features of our present.
Neither a return to paternal authority nor a stubborn defense of liberal civility can save us. Both are ethically compromised and historically obsolete. The task ahead is not to resurrect old affective and political tools but to invent new forms of shared meaning, reciprocal responsibility to care for one another, and collective commitments to protecting a universal right to individual difference—and freedom from economic and material oppression—powerful enough to inspire and sustain democratic life under contemporary conditions. This means building institutions capable of mediating difference without suppressing it, of sustaining a shared sense of reality without reimposing homogenizing violences of the past.
This is a daunting project, and it will not be accomplished overnight. But recognizing that we—and the fascism growing around us—are operating in a new political and psychic epoch is the first step toward the possibility of democratic renewal. The era of shame, debate, and civility is over. The demand of our time is to create new ways of relating to one another through which we might learn to live truly together, not to haunt the ruins of the old.
The post Why Shame No Longer Works in American Politics appeared first on New Republic.
