'That world has been unraveling': How the Trump era has ended shame

Supporters of Donald Trump celebrate after the Fox Network called the election in his favor at the site of his rally, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo

Social psychiatrist Eric Reinhart tells the Bulwark that shame has lost its power among the U.S. population, and that’s going to look ugly very fast.

Shame is necessary for the possibility of a democratic society, Reinhart said. It helps enforce ethical norms that allow mixed societies to function without resorting to violence.

Nowhere was this failure more indicative, said Reinhart, than in the widespread attempts to play down or ignore MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk’s targeting of vulnerable groups and “helping to build a movement that has openly embraced authoritarian violence.”

“[Kirk] should be a figure whose legacy inspires universal moral condemnation. Instead, prominent commentators — from far-right figures to liberal magazines — have strained to portray him as a legitimate political actor and courageous, principled debater,” Reinhart said. “The refusal to name Kirk’s tawdry legacy for what it is exposes a defining feature of our so-called post-truth political world and why the form of fascism now rising across the United States is of a fundamentally different nature than fascisms of times past: The cultural foundations that once gave shame its meaning and power have collapsed.

“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,” said Reinhart. “But that world has been unraveling for decades.”

Neoliberal political and economic transformations hollowed out the institutions that sustained our capacity to rely upon and trust in the paternal order, Reinhart said. “Unions were crushed, social welfare, upon which the state’s sometimes function as a benevolent father-like figure depended, was gutted, knowledge-producing institutions were privatized or undermined, and public life was financialized and increasingly left to the wolves of the market rather than the protective paternalism of planners, regulators, or elected representatives.”

Cultural authority is consequently fragmented and truth increasingly contested, and Reinhart said the Trump era accelerated the process: “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.”

Trump’s contemporary version of fascism thrives on that collapse.

“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,” Reinhart said. “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.”

Read the New Republic report at this link.

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