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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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