shaming people for their politics does not work
it gets weird really fast and i would like us to set aside our worst impulses here
Pleased to announce I’ve returned from an unintentional two-month hiatus. Every time I stop writing for a little while, the little gatekeeping goblin in my head gains strength, and then we have to fight and struggle for power until I win again. Working on that. Also, trying to be less on Twitter now that it is in new hands… so I will try to take myself seriously and continue actually having a newsletter!
Special thanks to everyone who gets sent Google Doc links and demands for read-throughs at increasingly random times.
On the Subject of Shame
With Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the potential downfall of it heavy on my mind, I’ve been thinking about the politics of shame, and how Twitter has been instrumental in the development of two distinct and extreme strains of shame and shaming. This evolution of shame and the blunt instrument of shaming people are not exclusive to Twitter, however.
A fear that I have and that I’ve touched on before is the fear that people are not genuinely learning to be tolerant or more humane but simply learning to better conceal their most objectionable views. The backlash to LGBTQ+ rights, to feminism and specifically the #MeToo movement, and to the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020 all feel illustrative of this to a certain point. People didn’t really grasp the whole point… which is about centuries of injustice and human suffering and righting that. Some people learned how to say “diversity” and “empowerment” and “I’m listening” more often and others turned the aforementioned events into evidence for a victimization complex and moral panic.
Where morality should be, it feels like many people simply have shame. They are concerned with the notion of “getting in trouble,” as tenuous and variable as that might be. Social norms keep them in check for the most part, but what happens when those change, or when our relationship to shame fundamentally shifts?
Online, shame might be most widely associated with “cancel culture” at this point, which could accurately be characterized as a brief but often fleeting shaming that if you’re already famous and powerful is a minor detour in your career. At worst, if you’re on the right or consider yourself a free-thinking libertarian, it is a ghoulish and vague concept that can be gestured at whenever you want to feel oppressed.
The shaming of public figures, politicians or celebrities, has become completely divorced from material consequences in many scenarios, and the blanket term of “cancelling” is so vague it’s useless—some are “cancelled” for questionable comments and others are “cancelled” for serious offenses.
On the right, shame has been successfully leveraged as a unifying force; the “woke mob” stokes fear and mobilizes the base, validates a sense of victimhood that drives much of the right’s culture war politics and insulates them from any sort of reckoning with the possibility that their beliefs may be wrong in any way. Shame from an outside force is not paralyzing in this case; it’s motivating. Any type of meaningful critique can also be deflected and dismissed as shaming from an uncredible source. An incredibly infuriating strategy that comes up again and again is when real criticism of a woman in power is dismissed as misogyny.
Meanwhile, the left seems to have a much more complicated and less promising relationship to shame. There is the cancel-obsessed left, which is everyone’s favorite strawman often used to dismiss leftist politics as a whole. P.E. Moskowitz compared this subgroup’s behavior to that of Puritanism—these people have a desire for personal moral absolution and authority over other peoples’ moral status. This dominates their politics, leading to the constant cancelling of others for “problematic behavior” with no room for forgiveness or learning, no desire for real progress. It is not difficult to see how shame runs everything off the tracks here. It is antithetical to empathy, it silences valid discussion of complicated issues, and it makes newcomers feel unwelcome.
Yet there is another, adjacent approach to shame that remains popular in certain circles despite its clear failure: dunking and calling out. This is something Twitter incentivizes in its format. Who doesn’t love a good quote retweet with a witty clapback? I have seen far too many bad takes exclusively because people I follow on Twitter quote retweeted it into my feed; by trying to shame the original poster, they end up amplifying their bad take. And I have rarely seen a bad take retracted or a sincere apology issued in such a scenario. I have yet to see Joe Biden reverse a political move or message on account of a ratio. It doesn’t really feel like anyone learns why they were wrong or why people want something different. This leaves me with little faith that the dunked-upon can do better in the future.
While I totally understand the entertainment appeal of dunking, it is becoming harder and harder for me to fathom how people can still believe they’re committing some kind of powerful political act. Instead, you’re risking spreading their message or building their whole career (see: Bari Weiss), convincing the “neutral” centrists that the fundamental issue is political polarization and we need to see both sides more often (not the solution sorry), and contributing to the opposing side’s sense of victimization.
While it is certainly not representative of reality, Twitter is where the brains of many members of the media and many politicians rot, and you can see how it impacts their narratives and messaging across the board oftentimes.
This type of pursuit of an aesthetic or representational win, entirely detached from material circumstances, explains bizarre narratives about “the left’s cultural power” in spite of largely conservative-dominated institutions and a limited degree of meaningful change in recent years. The shaming, whether it was shaming people for their misogyny or their racism or other genuinely harmful views, did not work for the most part. But what it did do was give a lot of people an excuse for a rightward lurch, a “backlash” to “balance it out.”
Shame is not working both because it puts people on the defensive, and because it doesn’t come with real consequences that are in line with the offense. People who cause harm should be faced with material consequences for their actions. These should come from their communities, not from the adjudicating body of a context-collapsed public outrage mob. This raises an even more complicated question about how we form community and hold each other and ourselves accountable. It also asks that we allow people to be morally ambiguous, not a flattened hero or villain. Moral ambiguity does not drive social media engagement. Moral ambiguity is not in demand content-wise. Moral ambiguity doesn’t allow for the right’s strategy of leveraging shame nor does it allow for a good dunk or the cancellation of every person who’s demonstrated the signs of a flaw.
The endpoint of the shame-driven ecosystem seems to be a complete shamelessness that produces opinions that feel like they were created in a lab to drive engagement, or an immunity to shaming that prevents public outrage from having any sort of impact. For everyone else, shame prevents continuing down the line of thought. It can be arresting. A fear of “getting in trouble” or being shamed can be isolating and close off opportunities to find solidarity. A culture where we’re always looking for reasons to shame each other and ourselves is one where we’re always finding new reasons to isolate and numb ourselves.
We should not be guided or guardrailed by shame alone. We’re all just people, who will inevitably mess up. There has never been and will never be a meaningful and socially positive politics run by fear and avoidance. Shame, in small amounts, is a feature of being human. It is something to be worked through gradually—locating the origins of certain shames and processing the helpful and unhelpful parts are a vital part of personal growth. Social media has taken shame to its extremes in such a way that has transformed our politics severely, but that doesn’t mean it’s permanent.
Removing shame from its outsized role can make room for the development of actual morals, politics, and complex sense of self. It’s a start towards distancing identity and ego from politics, and centering what ultimately matters—the impact politics has on real peoples’ lives.
Assigning You Reading - extra credit if you let me know what you think!
Have you ever heard of Nordic LARPing? I need someone to tell Nathan Fielder about this, it feels like the perfect premise for Season 2 of The Rehearsal.
Cringing on the Internet. Get some self-respect, know the price of what you want. Worshipping influencers will always be a bad idea.
I love Phoebe Bridgers. I hate Brad Pitt.
I could not stop laughing all through reading this account of the Gone Girl-themed Cruise.
The rainbow fentanyl myth is a moral panic. Fortesa Latifi on her experience with ketamine treatment for a TBI.
—
Slightly less recently read by me and recommended (last 2 months):
The Internet is already over. Hot girls may have IBS for bad reasons.
This absolutely scathing review of ‘longtermism’ and What We Owe To The Future.
What the push for return-to-office is really about.
An actual explanation for hard-to-hear movie dialogue.
Less yearning, more going for it. Heteropessimism - a term for a trend I feel most people do see.
—
Recently Read Books: Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
In the process of reading: Abolish the Family by Sophie Lewis, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
this is such an amazing essay! you're completely right, shame really doesn't work, and its doing so much more harm than good. you're a wonderful writer and you really hit the nail on the head with this one!