Thank you for this article. This 70 year old white lady in ND will use this for talking to my friends who think that the excuses they used are appropriate reasons for sitting out the 2024 election. I will now just respond to their excuses with HAVE YOU NO SHAME. Again thank you for this article.
Back to the comedy show and the xenophobic asshole you heard trashing the ethnicity of your date.
You took his apology seriously and just forgave and forgot circa couple of free drinks?
It’s all good because his ‘material’ was better the next time?!?!
Are you serious!
Aw shucks-he didn’t mean it & yo, dude, free drinx!! What’s not to like?
And-again-you’re sitting there with an Ethiopian national and you go and see this clown again because it’s FREE?
WTF is the actual matter with you?
This stuff that’s happening isn’t just some benign fucking comedy show where you can just swap lines in and out.
How many times have we been served bs apologetics, dismissals, and justifications for racist and misogynistic garbage flying out of Trump’s mouth?
I guess if maybe he sends you a ‘Tariff Dividend’ check, it’ll all be good? It’ll be ok to get paid your own money that’s already bent stolen from you.
Trump was just trying to bring some humor.
He was just being frank.
You’re being too ‘woke’ and sensitive.
Blah blah blah.
Sorry, but I can barely even take the rest of this article seriously….
Sounds to me that you’re more about being entertained by this toxic reality TV show than about taking this seriously, standing up and putting a stop to it.
And if Rick Wilson said to you that you weren’t being ‘fair’ to your friend ‘Leslie’ for abdicating her responsibility to show up and vote ? Sorry, I really like & admire Rick’s work in resisting this, but in that instance, he was totally full of shit.
I am, yet again impressed with your concise and accurate phraseology in stating, "shame is the emotional bridge between ignorance and wisdom". Spot-on! Its was well exempified by your shared experiences with friends Leslie and Rick, as well with your Ethiopian date at the comedy club.
I share your analysis and disgust of Elon Musk (which I also share about his former South African Apartheid racist/fascist partner, Peter Thiel). Both are shameless racists and fascist sympathizers and share the diagnosis of Sociopathy with Trump and his 1%'r enablers.
I found the whole piece analogous to a great book I read, entitled "The Sociopath Next Door". The author, a psychologist explained that the commonality among sociopaths is that they lack empathy, because they lack the ability to love anyone or anything but themselves. If you haven't read it, I recommend it, if you have any spare time.
So much ink is spent covering Cheeto’s Nazi corrupt regime and the Congressional Nazi Republicans that rarely is there any light shed on the Nazi Republican SCOTUS which controls the decision making of the judiciary and its revising constitutional law
Over at Democracy Docket Elias sits down(bit.ly/3L2jIeZ) with Sen Whitehouse(D RI) to talk about the corruption of SCOTUS which he calls a “captured court” Captured by wealthy billionaires particularly of the fossil fuel industry(FFI), the object is to pour dark money into the court in order to “buy the court’s” opinions SCOTUS is set to gut the Voting Rights Act(VRA) and dark $$$ is behind that as well as it helps billionaires control the electorate Lastly and most importantly lack of accountability of the FFI through agency oversight, or make sure that the Polluters Rule
There were Biden mistakes during his term and one of the serious ones was to develop a well intended evaluative effort of SCOTUS by not having the most important voices and opinions to participate in the effort Whilehouse points out 2 areas for SCOTUS reform: 1 Term limits and 2 Proper code of ethics supported by substantial fact checking
So WE the People should be calling out the corruption of the Nazi Republicans every chance WE get and make our anger known in Democratic primaries across the country Expose these greedy power grubbing crooks as often as WE can If WE the People do this, WE can ensure that they will out of power by the midterms and 2028 to end this nightmare WE the People control election outcomes NOT $$$$
One of the most important points you make, Kristoffer, is "confront(ing) your own reaction"... silence? shrinkage? That there are so many moral and ethical issues facing us with a constant bombardment of media information and requests creates exhaustion and overwhelm. When people are in this state their choices often veer toward avoidance and ambivalence.
Alison — yes. That line you pulled (“confronting your own reaction”) is really the hinge of the whole piece.
Because you’re right: the constant barrage of moral and ethical crises — plus the nonstop media churn and the endless requests to care, react, donate, share, sign, rage — doesn’t just inform people. It exhausts them. And once people hit that overwhelmed state, the nervous system starts reaching for the quickest relief available… which is usually avoidance.
That’s where “silence” and “shrinkage” come in. Not always because people don’t have values, but because they’re flooded. And when you’re flooded, your choices narrow: you disengage, you go numb, you become “ambivalent,” or you convince yourself that staying out of it is somehow wise or pure. It’s a very human coping strategy — but it has real political consequences.
I also think you’re naming something we don’t talk about enough: avoidance isn’t neutral. It becomes a decision that favors whoever is loudest, most organized, and least burdened by shame or conscience. The people willing to bulldoze through norms don’t get tired the same way, because they’re not doing the emotional labor of reflection.
So yes — part of what I’m pushing readers to do is simply notice their default reaction: Do I retreat? Do I rationalize? Do I scroll past? Do I tell myself it’s all hopeless? Because once you can see the pattern, you can interrupt it — and choose something smaller but real: one call, one conversation, one vote, one boundary, one action that breaks the spell of learned helplessness.
That’s the move from overwhelm to agency. And you captured it perfectly.
This is an interesting piece. As someone who works the polls and for voter education, I am less concerned with people who vote for independent candidates (or write-ins or whatever) than those who do not participate at all. Those who are participating are saying something about the state of their community or the country (look at the results of the 1992 presidential election and the electoral map, for example). And while we may not agree or align with one choice on a ballot, what about the others?
As for the 2000 election, that is not on Nader, that is on the Supreme Court. The shame is theirs for taking the franchise away from voters.
As for shame, I am still struggling with its usefulness. Perhaps it is because I associate it with its cousin, humiliation, which often quashes action and participation. I’m not sure that is what we want to do.
Postcards From Home — I really appreciate the tone and substance of this, and I want to respond in that same spirit.
I’ll start by saying this clearly: I always applaud people who exercise their right to vote. Participation matters, and people who show up are, as you said, communicating something about their community, their frustration, or their hopes. I don’t lump everyone who votes outside the two major parties into the same moral bucket, and I agree that non-participation is often the bigger democratic problem.
That said, I do think voting should never become an exercise in futility. At some point, voters have to grapple not just with expression, but with consequences. Symbolic voting feels principled in the moment, but politics is a system, not a diary entry.
Which brings me to my own 2000 vote. There’s no elegant way for me to spin voting for Nader — it was a dumb vote. Full stop. Yes, you can play the counterfactual game: if Gore had won, maybe we don’t get Obama; Bush still gave us a war; history is messy. All true. But those are post-hoc rationalizations. The honest explanation is simpler: I was young, idealistic, and underestimated how narrow the margins really were. The responsibility for Bush v. Gore absolutely lies with the Supreme Court — but that doesn’t absolve me from owning my choice.
And that’s where the shame process mattered for me. It wasn’t about wallowing in embarrassment or self-flagellation. It was about learning — hard — and deciding to put my best foot forward the next time. Shame, in that sense, wasn’t paralyzing; it was corrective.
I also want to be clear that I’m not categorically anti–third party. Here in Los Angeles, I work closely with the Working Families Party, and I respect what they do precisely because they’re not about playing spoiler. They focus on local races, coalition building, and moving conversations forward in ways that actually improve people’s lives. That’s very different from parachuting into high-stakes national elections with no viable path to victory and calling it virtue.
And that’s really my core point: there is nothing inherently noble about voting for someone you know is going to lose when the stakes are existential. That’s not cynicism — that’s realism. Democracy doesn’t just require passion; it requires judgment. That’s why psychology and critical thinking sit at the center of my work. How people reason, rationalize, avoid, or disengage matters just as much as what they believe.
Finally, on shame and humiliation: I agree with you that humiliation shuts people down — and that’s not what I’m advocating. What I’m arguing for is a form of moral reckoning that leads to growth, not withdrawal. If shame only ever silences people, it’s destructive. But if it leads to reflection, responsibility, and better choices next time, then it’s doing something useful.
Thank you for engaging this so thoughtfully. This is exactly the kind of pushback that makes the conversation sharper instead of smaller.
Thank you for writing this. I recognized "shame" as a topic needing more publicity back in Trump 1.0. Brene Brown brought it to my attention - shame as a sense of worthlessness that reinforces the "bad" behavior. In contrast, "guilt" recognizes our humanity - and that we made a poor choice. Guilt tends to encourage growth, new choices. That is the explanation that has worked best for me. Martha Sweezy addresses this later in the Comments section. Back in Trump 1.0, I began to pay more attention to addressing Climate Change - we, in the developed world, being the obvious culprits. I've definitely had to do some deep soul searching on this.
The lack of shame goes hand in hand with no one being accountable anymore. If the perpetrators supporters have no ability to sit with their choices and that what they led to are wrong they will continue to make excuses. We are a sick country.
I haven't been able to forgive my own brother for not voting for president. It's put a wedge in our relationship that apparently, only I'm feeling. He used the same excuses as your friend -- Gaza, anger at the Democrats.
I feel all the shame that those people don't. I DID vote for Harris, but we non-sociopaths feel all the shame for what is going on with our country. Could the "American Exceptionalism" line have helped with that? How about all the sociopaths and narcissists who run American companies and who run this country? They have no ability to feel empathy, so how can they feel shame?
You earned your right to speak to shame by admitting you voted for Nader in 2000. You can toss the Bush v. Gore Supreme's decision, chads, and Florida purging the voting rolls. Nader gave us Dubya, and two expensive wars, two tax cuts for the wealthy and a deep recession. I am not a violent person, but Nader is one guy I could punch. We can add empathy also to what Trump, Musk, and MAGA do not feel. I love this line - "We treat democracy like a group project where everyone wants their name on the final slide but no wants their fingerprints on the failure." Keep'em coming.
Keith — I hear you, and I don’t really disagree with the substance of what you’re saying.
You’re right that once you tally the downstream consequences — Bush v. Gore, the wars, the tax cuts, the economic wreckage — the Nader vote sits there like an unmovable object. You can cite the Supreme Court, Florida’s purges, hanging chads (and all of that matters), but at the end of the day, Nader didn’t help prevent any of it. Owning that is exactly why I don’t flinch from talking about shame in the first place. If I can’t look at my own bad judgment honestly, I don’t get to lecture anyone else.
And yes, part of the context matters too. Being an older millennial in 2000 was genuinely confusing. That era was kind of… fragmented. You can hear it in the music of the day. Everything felt split down the middle. On one end you had raw, gritty anger — DMX, Juvenile, Jay-Z ditching the shiny suits for Hard Knock Life, Pearl Jam simmering with resentment, and not long before that Kurt Cobain openly wrestling with despair and self-destruction. On the other end, you had hyper-polished, manufactured pop — Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC — cheerful, apolitical, frictionless.
That tension was the politics of the moment. There was no clear moral narrative holding things together. The Cold War was over, Clinton had muddied the waters of character and leadership, and for a lot of us, belief itself felt suspect. Cynicism felt smarter than commitment. Detachment felt like insight.
If I’m being brutally honest, my best defense is also my weakest one: I didn’t really believe in anything. I wasn’t voting for a coherent vision — I was voting against the system, trying to be countercultural without fully understanding the cost of performative rebellion. That’s not noble. It’s just true.
What shame did for me wasn’t to freeze me there — it forced me to grow out of that posture. It taught me that democracy isn’t an aesthetic or a protest identity. It’s a responsibility. You don’t get credit for standing apart if what you’re really doing is standing aside.
And that line you quoted — about democracy being a group project where everyone wants credit but no one wants fingerprints on the failure — that’s exactly the disease. Owning our fingerprints, even when it’s uncomfortable, is the only way this thing gets better.
So yeah — lesson learned the hard way. And I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.
Love this article about shame! I have been shouting this since Trumps first shit show!! I have been saying for years...... have these Trump voters NO SHAME!! Thank you for writing this article!!
The US will have a mountain of shame to carry for the foreseeable future. We deserve it. I haven't heard the term "exceptionalism" bandied about very much lately.
You deserve better friends.
Thank you for this article. This 70 year old white lady in ND will use this for talking to my friends who think that the excuses they used are appropriate reasons for sitting out the 2024 election. I will now just respond to their excuses with HAVE YOU NO SHAME. Again thank you for this article.
Back to the comedy show and the xenophobic asshole you heard trashing the ethnicity of your date.
You took his apology seriously and just forgave and forgot circa couple of free drinks?
It’s all good because his ‘material’ was better the next time?!?!
Are you serious!
Aw shucks-he didn’t mean it & yo, dude, free drinx!! What’s not to like?
And-again-you’re sitting there with an Ethiopian national and you go and see this clown again because it’s FREE?
WTF is the actual matter with you?
This stuff that’s happening isn’t just some benign fucking comedy show where you can just swap lines in and out.
How many times have we been served bs apologetics, dismissals, and justifications for racist and misogynistic garbage flying out of Trump’s mouth?
I guess if maybe he sends you a ‘Tariff Dividend’ check, it’ll all be good? It’ll be ok to get paid your own money that’s already bent stolen from you.
Trump was just trying to bring some humor.
He was just being frank.
You’re being too ‘woke’ and sensitive.
Blah blah blah.
Sorry, but I can barely even take the rest of this article seriously….
Sounds to me that you’re more about being entertained by this toxic reality TV show than about taking this seriously, standing up and putting a stop to it.
And if Rick Wilson said to you that you weren’t being ‘fair’ to your friend ‘Leslie’ for abdicating her responsibility to show up and vote ? Sorry, I really like & admire Rick’s work in resisting this, but in that instance, he was totally full of shit.
Kris: Thanks for another great opinion!
I am, yet again impressed with your concise and accurate phraseology in stating, "shame is the emotional bridge between ignorance and wisdom". Spot-on! Its was well exempified by your shared experiences with friends Leslie and Rick, as well with your Ethiopian date at the comedy club.
I share your analysis and disgust of Elon Musk (which I also share about his former South African Apartheid racist/fascist partner, Peter Thiel). Both are shameless racists and fascist sympathizers and share the diagnosis of Sociopathy with Trump and his 1%'r enablers.
I found the whole piece analogous to a great book I read, entitled "The Sociopath Next Door". The author, a psychologist explained that the commonality among sociopaths is that they lack empathy, because they lack the ability to love anyone or anything but themselves. If you haven't read it, I recommend it, if you have any spare time.
The Corrupt Nazi Republican SCOTUS
So much ink is spent covering Cheeto’s Nazi corrupt regime and the Congressional Nazi Republicans that rarely is there any light shed on the Nazi Republican SCOTUS which controls the decision making of the judiciary and its revising constitutional law
Over at Democracy Docket Elias sits down(bit.ly/3L2jIeZ) with Sen Whitehouse(D RI) to talk about the corruption of SCOTUS which he calls a “captured court” Captured by wealthy billionaires particularly of the fossil fuel industry(FFI), the object is to pour dark money into the court in order to “buy the court’s” opinions SCOTUS is set to gut the Voting Rights Act(VRA) and dark $$$ is behind that as well as it helps billionaires control the electorate Lastly and most importantly lack of accountability of the FFI through agency oversight, or make sure that the Polluters Rule
There were Biden mistakes during his term and one of the serious ones was to develop a well intended evaluative effort of SCOTUS by not having the most important voices and opinions to participate in the effort Whilehouse points out 2 areas for SCOTUS reform: 1 Term limits and 2 Proper code of ethics supported by substantial fact checking
So WE the People should be calling out the corruption of the Nazi Republicans every chance WE get and make our anger known in Democratic primaries across the country Expose these greedy power grubbing crooks as often as WE can If WE the People do this, WE can ensure that they will out of power by the midterms and 2028 to end this nightmare WE the People control election outcomes NOT $$$$
One of the most important points you make, Kristoffer, is "confront(ing) your own reaction"... silence? shrinkage? That there are so many moral and ethical issues facing us with a constant bombardment of media information and requests creates exhaustion and overwhelm. When people are in this state their choices often veer toward avoidance and ambivalence.
Alison — yes. That line you pulled (“confronting your own reaction”) is really the hinge of the whole piece.
Because you’re right: the constant barrage of moral and ethical crises — plus the nonstop media churn and the endless requests to care, react, donate, share, sign, rage — doesn’t just inform people. It exhausts them. And once people hit that overwhelmed state, the nervous system starts reaching for the quickest relief available… which is usually avoidance.
That’s where “silence” and “shrinkage” come in. Not always because people don’t have values, but because they’re flooded. And when you’re flooded, your choices narrow: you disengage, you go numb, you become “ambivalent,” or you convince yourself that staying out of it is somehow wise or pure. It’s a very human coping strategy — but it has real political consequences.
I also think you’re naming something we don’t talk about enough: avoidance isn’t neutral. It becomes a decision that favors whoever is loudest, most organized, and least burdened by shame or conscience. The people willing to bulldoze through norms don’t get tired the same way, because they’re not doing the emotional labor of reflection.
So yes — part of what I’m pushing readers to do is simply notice their default reaction: Do I retreat? Do I rationalize? Do I scroll past? Do I tell myself it’s all hopeless? Because once you can see the pattern, you can interrupt it — and choose something smaller but real: one call, one conversation, one vote, one boundary, one action that breaks the spell of learned helplessness.
That’s the move from overwhelm to agency. And you captured it perfectly.
This is an interesting piece. As someone who works the polls and for voter education, I am less concerned with people who vote for independent candidates (or write-ins or whatever) than those who do not participate at all. Those who are participating are saying something about the state of their community or the country (look at the results of the 1992 presidential election and the electoral map, for example). And while we may not agree or align with one choice on a ballot, what about the others?
As for the 2000 election, that is not on Nader, that is on the Supreme Court. The shame is theirs for taking the franchise away from voters.
As for shame, I am still struggling with its usefulness. Perhaps it is because I associate it with its cousin, humiliation, which often quashes action and participation. I’m not sure that is what we want to do.
Postcards From Home — I really appreciate the tone and substance of this, and I want to respond in that same spirit.
I’ll start by saying this clearly: I always applaud people who exercise their right to vote. Participation matters, and people who show up are, as you said, communicating something about their community, their frustration, or their hopes. I don’t lump everyone who votes outside the two major parties into the same moral bucket, and I agree that non-participation is often the bigger democratic problem.
That said, I do think voting should never become an exercise in futility. At some point, voters have to grapple not just with expression, but with consequences. Symbolic voting feels principled in the moment, but politics is a system, not a diary entry.
Which brings me to my own 2000 vote. There’s no elegant way for me to spin voting for Nader — it was a dumb vote. Full stop. Yes, you can play the counterfactual game: if Gore had won, maybe we don’t get Obama; Bush still gave us a war; history is messy. All true. But those are post-hoc rationalizations. The honest explanation is simpler: I was young, idealistic, and underestimated how narrow the margins really were. The responsibility for Bush v. Gore absolutely lies with the Supreme Court — but that doesn’t absolve me from owning my choice.
And that’s where the shame process mattered for me. It wasn’t about wallowing in embarrassment or self-flagellation. It was about learning — hard — and deciding to put my best foot forward the next time. Shame, in that sense, wasn’t paralyzing; it was corrective.
I also want to be clear that I’m not categorically anti–third party. Here in Los Angeles, I work closely with the Working Families Party, and I respect what they do precisely because they’re not about playing spoiler. They focus on local races, coalition building, and moving conversations forward in ways that actually improve people’s lives. That’s very different from parachuting into high-stakes national elections with no viable path to victory and calling it virtue.
And that’s really my core point: there is nothing inherently noble about voting for someone you know is going to lose when the stakes are existential. That’s not cynicism — that’s realism. Democracy doesn’t just require passion; it requires judgment. That’s why psychology and critical thinking sit at the center of my work. How people reason, rationalize, avoid, or disengage matters just as much as what they believe.
Finally, on shame and humiliation: I agree with you that humiliation shuts people down — and that’s not what I’m advocating. What I’m arguing for is a form of moral reckoning that leads to growth, not withdrawal. If shame only ever silences people, it’s destructive. But if it leads to reflection, responsibility, and better choices next time, then it’s doing something useful.
Thank you for engaging this so thoughtfully. This is exactly the kind of pushback that makes the conversation sharper instead of smaller.
Thank you for writing this. I recognized "shame" as a topic needing more publicity back in Trump 1.0. Brene Brown brought it to my attention - shame as a sense of worthlessness that reinforces the "bad" behavior. In contrast, "guilt" recognizes our humanity - and that we made a poor choice. Guilt tends to encourage growth, new choices. That is the explanation that has worked best for me. Martha Sweezy addresses this later in the Comments section. Back in Trump 1.0, I began to pay more attention to addressing Climate Change - we, in the developed world, being the obvious culprits. I've definitely had to do some deep soul searching on this.
The lack of shame goes hand in hand with no one being accountable anymore. If the perpetrators supporters have no ability to sit with their choices and that what they led to are wrong they will continue to make excuses. We are a sick country.
I haven't been able to forgive my own brother for not voting for president. It's put a wedge in our relationship that apparently, only I'm feeling. He used the same excuses as your friend -- Gaza, anger at the Democrats.
I meant to add that he also expresses no feelings of shame.
I feel all the shame that those people don't. I DID vote for Harris, but we non-sociopaths feel all the shame for what is going on with our country. Could the "American Exceptionalism" line have helped with that? How about all the sociopaths and narcissists who run American companies and who run this country? They have no ability to feel empathy, so how can they feel shame?
You were right to ring up shame. We’re not human without it.
You earned your right to speak to shame by admitting you voted for Nader in 2000. You can toss the Bush v. Gore Supreme's decision, chads, and Florida purging the voting rolls. Nader gave us Dubya, and two expensive wars, two tax cuts for the wealthy and a deep recession. I am not a violent person, but Nader is one guy I could punch. We can add empathy also to what Trump, Musk, and MAGA do not feel. I love this line - "We treat democracy like a group project where everyone wants their name on the final slide but no wants their fingerprints on the failure." Keep'em coming.
Keith — I hear you, and I don’t really disagree with the substance of what you’re saying.
You’re right that once you tally the downstream consequences — Bush v. Gore, the wars, the tax cuts, the economic wreckage — the Nader vote sits there like an unmovable object. You can cite the Supreme Court, Florida’s purges, hanging chads (and all of that matters), but at the end of the day, Nader didn’t help prevent any of it. Owning that is exactly why I don’t flinch from talking about shame in the first place. If I can’t look at my own bad judgment honestly, I don’t get to lecture anyone else.
And yes, part of the context matters too. Being an older millennial in 2000 was genuinely confusing. That era was kind of… fragmented. You can hear it in the music of the day. Everything felt split down the middle. On one end you had raw, gritty anger — DMX, Juvenile, Jay-Z ditching the shiny suits for Hard Knock Life, Pearl Jam simmering with resentment, and not long before that Kurt Cobain openly wrestling with despair and self-destruction. On the other end, you had hyper-polished, manufactured pop — Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC — cheerful, apolitical, frictionless.
That tension was the politics of the moment. There was no clear moral narrative holding things together. The Cold War was over, Clinton had muddied the waters of character and leadership, and for a lot of us, belief itself felt suspect. Cynicism felt smarter than commitment. Detachment felt like insight.
If I’m being brutally honest, my best defense is also my weakest one: I didn’t really believe in anything. I wasn’t voting for a coherent vision — I was voting against the system, trying to be countercultural without fully understanding the cost of performative rebellion. That’s not noble. It’s just true.
What shame did for me wasn’t to freeze me there — it forced me to grow out of that posture. It taught me that democracy isn’t an aesthetic or a protest identity. It’s a responsibility. You don’t get credit for standing apart if what you’re really doing is standing aside.
And that line you quoted — about democracy being a group project where everyone wants credit but no one wants fingerprints on the failure — that’s exactly the disease. Owning our fingerprints, even when it’s uncomfortable, is the only way this thing gets better.
So yeah — lesson learned the hard way. And I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.
Love this article about shame! I have been shouting this since Trumps first shit show!! I have been saying for years...... have these Trump voters NO SHAME!! Thank you for writing this article!!
Nice piece. Not too long, insightful, theoretical yet practical.
The US will have a mountain of shame to carry for the foreseeable future. We deserve it. I haven't heard the term "exceptionalism" bandied about very much lately.