The miracle of shame to hold powerful people accountable

It’s difficult to pay attention to contemporary public life and not wonder how public figures get away with it. I don’t mean how do they get away with evasions, half-truths, partisan inconsistency and “spin.” These rhetorical tricks and petty hypocrisies are probably unavoidable in mass democracies. They are wearying, and can be demoralizing to folks with high-minded hopes for public life, but they might just be the cost of doing the business of large-scale politics in a fragmented media environment. We largely just accept it as par for the course and correct for it without thinking much.

But, weary semi-cynic that I am, I am still shocked by the ability of some politicians to get away with bald-faced lying, blatant hypocrisy and comments that brutally defame or even dehumanize groups and persons that they view as enemies. The administration in the U.S. offers us daily examples, but we have our share of this in Canada (if in a slightly more low-key way). The Alberta government issued a statement marking Trans Day of Remembrance (expressing solidarity with transgender people and “championing acceptance” and the hope of “building a safe society where everyone can live free from violence and prejudice”) two days after using the notwithstanding clause to pre-empt even the possibility of the courts reviewing their legislation for potential violations of transgender people’s rights. Whatever you think of the issue, it takes some real chutzpah to do that. How do they get away with it?

An era of shamelessness

The trick to getting away with lies, dehumanization and hypocrisy is to be dead to shame. Never apologize, never retreat, never admit a misstep; just brazen your way through it. Double down. We used to respect people who could admit mistakes and face the consequences. Governments used to expect ministers who had bungled something to resign in disgrace. Now, governments close ranks around the likes of Pete Hegseth (who disclosed top-secret information in a series of vainglorious and insecure text messages earlier this year). We live in an era of shamelessness.
Shame has a bad rap and, in some ways, deservedly so. No one should be made to feel shame for who they are; we are all of us inestimably precious image-bearers of a good Creator. But a different kind of shame plays an essential role in regulating social conduct.

We can’t have enforceable rules for everything. We can’t “ban” politicians from lying to us; we don’t have mechanisms for forcing an incompetent minister to resign if his party backs him with their parliamentary majority. Where virtue can’t be enforced, we depend on people’s sense of decency, self-respect and responsibility to keep them honest. Shame is the appropriate feeling we have when our failures to abide by that sense are brought to notice. If you are caught in a lie, or a contradiction, or revealed as a bungling incompetent in power, you should be ashamed. And we should be ashamed to be governed by people who have no such shame.

But in this era, appropriate shame looks to too many of us like weakness, and what we want is strength – or rather the performance of strength. Real strength includes a sense of shame, but we seem to be rewarding the kind of vainglory that manifests itself as shamelessness. We should be ashamed.