Shame: The Comeback Tour America Didn’t Know It Needed

How Trump, Musk, and a nation of shameless bystanders dragged us here — and why owning the embarrassment is the only way out.

Illustration by Riley Levine

I was having a conversation with a couple of friends the other night about the people who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris last year. And somewhere between Trump’s latest racist tirade, the structural rot in the Democratic Party, Elon Musk’s ongoing crusade against reality, and the never-ending hand-wringing over the non-voters of 2024, it finally hit me: this country has a shame problem. Or rather, it has a shame vacuum. A shame drought. Shame has packed up its bags, caught the next flight out of LAX, and hasn’t been seen since Obama’s second inauguration.

I told my friends, “Man, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive this country for electing Trump to a second non-consecutive term—especially after everything he did the first time.” And one of them, Rick, nodded and said, “Yeah, the people who didn’t vote for Harris should be ashamed of themselves.” Which is exactly when my friend, Leslie, chimed in, completely breezy, and said, “Well, I voted for everyone except the president, and I’m fine with it. I don’t like what he’s doing with ICE or tariffs, but I’m not ashamed.”

I looked at her the way a parent looks at a child who proudly announces they stuck a fork in an electrical socket. Like, really? You’re proudly saying you didn’t vote for Harris, while also admitting you hate everything Trump has done in just this one catastrophic year? How exactly did you think we were going to avoid this outcome? Harris was the only viable alternative. She wasn’t a raffle prize at a church picnic. She wasn’t an optional add-on like heated seats. She was the Democratic nominee.

Leslie then launched into the greatest hits of Excuses People Make When They Don’t Want to Admit They Screwed Up: Harris was too friendly with Liz Cheney. She didn’t stand up for Palestinians the way Leslie wanted. Trump “felt more authentic.” And yes, that last one almost made me swallow my tongue. Trump feels more authentic in the same way carbon monoxide feels more refreshing—you only think that because your brain is already dying.

So I told her, “You mean to tell me that you look at everything going on in 2025—the ICE raids, the tariffs, the chaos, the international humiliation—and you feel no shame about not voting for Harris?” And she said, “Well, it’s not like it’s my fault she lost.” And that right there was the problem.

I told her, “No, you didn’t single-handedly cause her to lose, but this entire attitude of indifference is part of the reason she didn’t win. I’m not blaming you as an individual, but you should at least feel shame.” Even Rick stepped in, gently, like a friend trying to deescalate a bar fight, and said, “Ealy, isn’t that going too far?” And hours later I still don’t know what he meant.

Too far? Shame is not a firing squad. Shame is a seatbelt. Shame is a mirror. Shame is asking yourself, “Did I contribute to this mess?” I wasn’t asking Leslie to join the witness protection program. I wasn’t asking her to shave her head and ring a bell in the street yelling “Shame!” like that scene from Game of Thrones. I was simply saying that adults who make consequential choices in a democracy should feel the appropriate emotional response when those choices help pave the road to disaster.

As a political psychologist, I couldn’t resist pulling the conversation into theory. What Leslie was describing was textbook diffusion of responsibility—the same phenomenon that makes people ignore someone having a seizure in a crowd but turn into Florence Nightingale when it’s just the two of you in a room. Albert Bandura, who practically built the field of social cognitive theory, would call the rest of her mindset moral disengagement—the ability to mentally separate your choices from their consequences so you don’t feel guilt.

In other words, it wasn’t that she didn’t have shame. It’s that she figured out how to emotionally outsource it. And that, right there, is the American condition. We treat democracy like a group project where everyone wants their name on the final slide but no one wants their fingerprints on the failure.

When I asked if they heard Trump’s racist remarks about Rep. Ilhan Omar—the ones where he called Somali immigrants “garbage” and told them to go back where they came from—both of them said they had. And as disgusting as those words were, it was the familiarity of it that hit me hardest. That feeling of being suddenly thrust into an atmosphere where someone is spewing xenophobic trash at a group of people who don’t deserve it, and you’re forced to confront your own reaction. Or your silence. Or your impulse to shrink.

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That’s when my mind drifted back to a night about thirteen years ago, long before Trump ever stepped foot in the Oval Office.

When I was a student at University of Southern California Annenberg, I went on a date with an Ethiopian woman. Beautiful, smart, warm. One night we went to the old Comedy Union on Pico. There was a young comedian—he’s kind of famous now, so I won’t say his name—who started his set with regular stuff, but about five minutes in he launched into this long, xenophobic bit about Ethiopians. And when I tell you the jokes were offensive, I mean they would’ve made Tucker Carlson wince.

I immediately felt ashamed that I had brought my date to this. I leaned over to my date and said, “We can leave if you want.” She said we could stay, but I could tell she wasn’t loving it. After the show, he was outside greeting people like comedians do, and he complimented her headwrap. Then he asked where she was from.

She whispered “Ethiopia,” and I swear to God this man’s face went pale, like he had just found out the joke police were on their way. He immediately launched into apologies—not one, not two, but a musical number of apologies. He apologized so many times I was starting to get embarrassed for him.

He said, “Look, I’ve got better material. Come see me at the Ice House in Pasadena next week. I’ll take care of you both. Drinks on me.” And the man actually followed through—messaged me on Facebook, reminded me about the show, and when we went, his set was completely different.

That is shame. That is what shame looks like in a functioning human adult. Shame says, “I hurt someone. I didn’t realize it. Now that I see it, I’ll do better.” Shame is a catalyst for growth. Shame is a moral smoke detector. Without shame, people become dangerous.

I grew up around people from all over the world. My grandmother is Jamaican. I’ve dated Nigerian women, Jamaican women, Ethiopian women. I teach international students—brilliant young people from the same countries Trump likes to call “shitholes.” And because of that, I’ve always carried myself with an awareness of how racism lands on real people. I’ve always tried not to embarrass the people I love.

But with Trump as president, I am constantly embarrassed. Constantly holding my breath. Constantly having to explain to students why the leader of the free world sounds like a YouTube comment. Shame is the appropriate response to that. Shame says, “This is not who we should be.”

Which brings me to the second patron saint of American shamelessness (by way of South Africa): Elon Musk. Earlier this year, Musk—Mr. Woke Mind Virus himself—went on yet another rant about DEI and how diversity initiatives were supposedly racist against white people. Musk has a long, well-documented history of this nonsense. His entire worldview is built on the fear that “whiteness” is under attack—a concept so scientifically empty it could be used as packing peanuts. And just to demonstrate the intellectual rigor of his position, Musk was once again claiming that U.S. media and schools were racist against white and Asian people.

Whiteness is not an endangered species. Whiteness is a man-made construct that shifts every 40 years depending on which group white people decide to let into the club. The Irish weren’t white until they were. Italians weren’t white until they were. Ashkenazi Jews weren’t white until some white people needed them to be.

The idea that whiteness is being “destroyed” is not only racist—it’s biologically illiterate. Musk, for someone who has clearly had a lot of sex — sex I am 100% sure he got from good looks and personality, not anything related to his near trillionare status (chuckle). But allow me to give him the sex education he forgot to buy with his money since he does not seem to understand how sex works. When people from different backgrounds mate, sometimes they produce offspring. That offspring inherits traits from each parent. That’s not whiteness being destroyed. That’s culture blending.

The only reason it feels like whiteness is disappearing is because the exclusivity of whiteness is disappearing. You’re not losing whiteness. You’re losing the hierarchy that whiteness built.

But men like Musk and Trump—these rich corporate ass hats in the 1%—have helped cultivate a culture where shamelessness is treated as a form of authenticity. Musk, the paper billionaire whose family may or may not have profited off questionable means in South Africa, struts around dispensing racial theories he didn’t even bother to Google. Trump, the man who spent decades cosplaying as a business titan thanks to Mark Burnett and the ghost of Fred Trump’s racist real estate empire, now operates as the spiritual leader of the Proudly Shameless.

And shamelessness trickles down. It infects the culture. It gives us Nicki Minaj lecturing Nigerians about Nigeria. It gives us Kanye West publicly gushing about Hitler. It gives us the late Hulk Hogan making an ass of himself at the Republican National Convention in 2024. Being shameless has become a personality type. A political identity. A cultural aesthetic.

Trump’s voters have shown us exactly who they are. These are people who are either racist or have no problem with racism, which makes them no better. They’re not reachable. They don’t care. Shame has no place in their worldview. But the voters who didn’t vote—the ones who tricked themselves into believing Trump was somehow better than Harris, only to start panicking once the consequences arrived—those people have work to do.

And the work begins with shame. If anyone is telling you, “Don’t feel ashamed for not voting for Harris,” I’m telling you they’re wrong. You should feel shame. Not guilt. Not self-loathing. Shame. Shame is the emotional bridge between ignorance and wisdom. Shame is the thing that says, “When I walk into a room that someone else vandalized, I at least want to be the person who tried to clean up the trash—not the one who defecated on the walls.”

That shame needs to sit with you while Trump is in office. Every time he starts a tariff war. Every time he dispatches Pete Hegseth to kill innocent people under the rebranded Department of War. Every time ICE agents invade a city for political optics. Every time he violates the Emoluments Clause. Every time he mocks Americans from countries he deems undesirable. When you feel anger, let shame sit beside it. Not as a punishment, but as a teacher.

I’ve told the story a thousand times: I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. I was 19. I didn’t know shit about shit. But once I learned more, that shame moved me toward understanding. It made me better. It made me wiser. Shame taught me that choices have consequences. That elections matter. That protest votes are not harmless.

Shame helped me grow. And your shame—if you let it—can pull you out of this moment. Accept that what you did was ill-advised. Feel the shame. Learn from it. Be better. The time for crying is over. But the shame should stay with you long enough to ensure you never make the same mistake again.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. Read the original column here.