A few thoughts re shame/shaming in the national political discourse:

To begin, democracies rely on the concept of shame. What I mean is: They rely on ideas of decency & fairness (to whom & according to whom vary over time/place). The penalty for indecency & unfairness is SHAME.

Because it’s not a fine or jail, shame is a penalty you have to cooperate with society to experience. The society tells you “this is shameful” and you respond “I feel ashamed, know why this is shameful and will not do this again.”

That is a big part of the social contract.

But at this moment, IMO, there are two segments with outsized influence: people who refuse to or simply do not feel shame, and people who are AWASH in shame, soaking in it, constantly in a state of shame.

And they have found each other.

For people awash in the experience of shame, those who don’t seem to experience it, who have the opportunity to opt out of shame - they’re goddamn heroes.

Being able to just say, “I refuse to feel ashamed, nothing I do is shameful, take your shame & shove it.” That’s the dream.

Caveat: walking around with a heavy load of shame, feeling ashamed about things you can’t control, telling yourself/Receiving negative stories that ignite shame in you about yourself - it’s not a good thing. It’s deeply damaging.

The problem isn’t not enough but too much shame.

My theory of conspiracy theorists & white supremacy & authoritarianism is they are expressions of curdled shame. They are a way to shift blame, claim dignity, enact revenge on those who shamed you.

So here’s the trouble for those on the other side: you can’t shame these folks.

They can not feel anymore shame. They are all shamed out. And when you try to make them accept even more shame, they retaliate, which they’ve been itching to do for awhile because shame is a terrible thing to carry.

Now enter their heroes.

Their heroes are rich sociopaths. These are, as @stueccles pointed out to me this morning, people with “F*ck you” money.

They are so rich they can do whatever they want.

They‘re also sociopaths, so they don’t waste time with shame. They don’t have to accept your shaming.

Zuckerberg, Murdoch, 45 - they all either have or front like they have f*ck you money.

They can observe that society sees their actions as shameful. They just refuse to accept their part of the contract, feeling ashamed. So they do whatever they want.

Now, the folks awash in shame have a tendency to believe (read more @GeorgeLakoff and you’ll see why) that if you are rich “you must be doing something right” (see also, the Prosperity Gospel).

And one of the things they’re “doing right” is telling society to shove shame.

That, by the way, is what “owning the libs” is - it’s throwing the center-left’s attempts at shaming people into decency and fairness back in their faces.

These rich sociopaths, not coincidentally, have big platforms. Large swathes of the internet are now just Facebook.

Fox News is a content manufacturer for Facebook. DJT is a source for Fox News’s content-making machine.

And they’re laughing in the face of “decent & fair” society’s attempt to shame them. They think people who don’t feel the same way they do are either faking it or weak.

Real strength is the absence of shame. You have so much power shame can’t touch you.

That’s the belief.

If you lived your life awash in shame, you’d want that kind of power, and in lieu of that you’d want someone with that kind of power on your side.

So. The left attempting to shame or call out or call in or mock people who reject shame because they’ve either had too much or can opt out of it altogether (because money)... this is not an effective strategy.

The more shame you direct at them, the more vengeful they become.

So, how do you break the loop?

In a @BreneBrown sort of vein, the antidote, it seems to me, for excessive, punishing, toxic shame is the fostering of dignity.

The hard part is conceiving of a forward-facing dignity, not a retroactive dignity.

“Taking back” and “going back” and “getting back to” - these are comforting lullabies. They suggest a bygone era of dignity. But that era - if it ever existed - was exclusive, traumatic and painful for a lot of people. Including the “white working class”.

We need - literally, for America to survive - an inclusive, healing era of dignity.

I actually think a thing that unites people like B*den and people like AOC is that they are both interested in creating the conditions for human dignity.

(Different approaches to be sure.)

Going into November, I’d like to see a 2-pronged argument: this regime is less interested in its followers’ dignity than in their own f*ck you money power; and the greatest and richest country in the world can and must create the conditions for human dignity for its citizens.

That’s the project - not to roll back changes to 2015 (which was okay but not great), or to 1955 (which was, come on, awful).

It’s to move forward. Not to “give people dignity” but to create the conditions for you to lift up your own dignity, and to put down some shame.

What gives people a sense of dignity? Well, look at the sources of shame (most of these things are not all your fault):
* Illness & disability
* poverty & debt
* lack of education
* lack of work
* lack of housing
* inability to provide for/protect your children
* vulnerability

What gives people dignity?
* feeling safe
* feeling loved
* feeling seen & respected
* having purpose
* feeling useful
* having hope

These are pillars of good policy. We used to have honest arguments about how to create these conditions. Now, 20-40% don’t believe it’s possible.

If I were advising the Democrats (and I am not), I would ask them to let @ProjectLincoln do the shaming, while they do the dignity foundation-building.

Dignity isn’t one-size-fits-all. Everyone doesn’t have the same sources of shame. But a truly big tent would see that.

That’s it, that’s the thread.