The Social and Political Life of Shame: The U.S. 2016 Presidential Election

Abstract

The social, economic, and political context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency provides a fertile opportunity for the examination of the social and political life of shame in the United States. Trump’s transfer of the shame of poor and lower middle-class Whites to immigrants, refugees, and people of color was an ingredient in his ability to build a base of support to help engender his electoral success. Deserved shame is differentiated from undeserved shame. Confrontation with feelings of shame is necessary in working and living across normalized social, economic, and racial borders. Psychoanalytic contributions on the metabolization of deserved shame are needed at social, political, and psychological levels of organization. Psychological practitioners need to cultivate a willingness to work with their own deserved shame so that psychosocial accompaniment can become a more common form of practice.

Keywords:

• deserved shame
• generative shame
• psychosocial accompaniment
• reintegrative shame
• undeserved shame.

Notes

¹ Some portions of this paper are drawn from my chapter “The Souls of Anglos” (Casey & Watkins, 2014).

² Gilbert described membership remorse as a group member’s remorse over the act of a group of which he or she is a member. The group member needn’t have directly perpetrated the acts or even known about them at the time. Gilbert (2001) said that group “members all bear some relevant relation to the act of their group “because of their participation in the underlying joint commitment” (p. 227). It may be suffered secretly, she said, with others not knowing. Membership and group remorse not only pave the way for “backward-looking forgiveness but a renewal of forward-looking trust” (p. 218). To move from shame to remorse allows the shift from defensive and hostile relations to the possibility of a desire for making amends, restitution, reparations.

³ Trump has described women as “disgusting,” “fat pigs,” having “the face of a dog,” and a “piece of ass”; Mexicans as rapists and criminals; and African Americans as lazy by inborn trait. Trump ran his campaign on shaming immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, and women in an effort to lift up Whites who feel betrayed by the government, left behind, and overrun and outrun by minorities on the brink of majority status.

⁴ Lynd (1961) emphasized that although we may strive to be guilt-free, we would not strive to be free of shame. She quoted Zephaniah 3:5, a minor prophet in the Hebrew Bible: “The unjust knoweth no shame” (p. 24).

⁵ Haslett (2016) continued, “This is the divide. This is the choice. Make shame—your own and others’—into a weapon, as these men have done, and you get the closest thing to fascism we’ve had in this country since the 1930s. Create the room for shame’s articulation, and therefore a recognition of our commonality, and you have at least a shot at the working basis for an ameliorative democracy” (para. 28).

⁶ Societal conditions that favor communitarianism at the societal level and interdependence at the individual level of analysis are most conducive.

⁷ Restorative justice is upheld by three pillars (Zehr, 2002): harms and related needs; obligations that have resulted from harms; and engagement of victims, offenders, and the community.

⁸ Arlie Hochschild engaged in a process akin to that advanced by the Compassionate Listening Project (http://www.compassionatelistening.org/), a process of listening closely to members of both sides of a conflict who do not talk directly with each other.

⁹ A group process called “Deep Democracy” by Jungian analyst Arnie Mindell provides a format for this kind of listening (see Deep Democracy Institute, n.d.).

¹⁰ Thomas Scheff has noted that bypassed shame results in excessive thought and/or speech but little feeling (M. Lewis, 1995).

¹¹ The Public Conversation Project offers guidelines for conversations between people from different locations on the political spectrum. See “Reaching Out Across the Red-Blue Divide, One Person at a Time” by Maggie Herzig (2006).

¹² In the language of liberation theology, accompaniment can lead to conversion to those we share life with, decentering us from our earlier positionality.

¹³ In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Jane Addams (1910) shared, “During the many relief visits I paid that winter in tenement houses and miserable lodgings, I was constantly shadowed by a certain sense of shame that I should be comfortable in the midst of such distress” (Chapter 12, para. 2). It was through Addams’s commitment to accompaniment of immigrants that she was able to place herself in situations where she would experience such shame, be able to reflect on it, and allow it to inform and fuel her decades of committed solidarity.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Watkins

Mary Watkins, PhD, a developmental and clinical psychologist, is the cofounder of the Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, and Ecopsychology Specialization of the MA/PhD Depth Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she has taught as a professor for 22 years. She is the coauthor of Toward Psychologies of Liberation and Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.–Mexico Border, among other books. For the last decade, her community work has concerned support for immigrants without documents and asylum seekers.