We’re Living in a Post-Shame Society

When the accusation becomes the credential

Humours of an Election - Canvassing for Votes by William Hogarth, 1755 (public domain - Wikipedia)

“Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.”

— François de La Rochefoucauld, 1665

On the same day this week, in two countries, two leaders answered corruption problems with the same audacious solution: they embraced it.

In France, an appeals court upheld Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds — some €2.8 million over more than a decade — and within hours she announced she would seek the presidency anyway, the ruling having conveniently restored, as she put it, the voter’s freedom to choose her.¹

On the same day in Britain, Nigel Farage resigned his seat in Parliament rather than wait out an inquiry into undisclosed gifts, then declared he would run to win it back, recasting an ethics investigation as a “people versus the establishment” crusade. “Making money is not a crime,” he offered, completely ignoring the method. By that logic, bank robbery would be a respectable vocation.²

Neither one of them denied the charge. Each used it to their advantage.

Le Pen and Farage are the counter-tide: the accused no longer retreat before public judgment — they run on the charge, betting the public rewards defiance. The machinery of shame hasn’t just rusted; it’s been reverse-engineered into a campaign engine.

We know the American edition. A president convicted on 34 felony counts and inaugurated all the same — a sequence recited so often it has lost the power to startle.

That is the tell of a post-shame society: not that misconduct occurs, but that it no longer shocks, no longer needs to be hidden. The accusation that was once a liability to be buried is now a credential to be brandished. The trial becomes a referendum. The verdict of the court is appealed not to a higher court but to a friendlier crowd.

Was it always thus? In a sense, yes — there has always been a path for those shameless enough to abandon self-respect in exchange for power.

When Vice Still Wanted Cover

In 62 BC, Publius Clodius Pulcher disguised himself as a woman to slip into the rites of the Bona Dea, a festival closed to men, held that year in the house of Julius Caesar. Caught and tried for sacrilege, he was acquitted by a jury that Cicero — who testified against him — was certain had been bought.

In his letters, Cicero recorded the sordid arithmetic with a lawyer’s contempt: the jurors had demanded their bribes up front, trusting the defendant no further than he trusted them. And then Clodius was elected tribune of the plebs, and used the office to drive Cicero himself into exile. Vengeance upon corruption upon sacrilege.

But note what Clodius still wanted: an acquittal. A verdict of not guilty, purchased though it was. Even bribery is a backhanded compliment to the idea of innocence — it wants the appearance of virtue badly enough to pay for it.

That is La Rochefoucauld’s tribute: vice doffing its cap to a standard it has no intention of meeting, but whose existence it concedes.

Crime as a Platform

James Michael Curley of Boston moved the practice closer to our own moment. As a young man on the make, he sat for a civil service examination using another man’s name. He was convicted of fraud and turned the offense into virtuous folklore: he had done it for a friend, the story went.

Curley was elected him anyway — as a state representative, then to the Board of Aldermen, then to Congress, four non-consecutive terms as mayor, including a stint as governor of Massachusetts along the way. His term as governor was described as “ludicrous part of the time, shocking most of the time, and tawdry all of the time.”

He served part of that final mayoral term in a federal prison, after a mail-fraud conviction. When his sentence was commuted, the city welcomed him home. Curley neither hid the crime nor bought an acquittal. He sold it — as proof of loyalty, of a man who took care of his own. The corruption was not the embarrassment to be explained away. It was the platform.

Between Clodius and Curley lies the whole distance we have traveled: from vice that still craves the cover of innocence to vice that runs on the rap sheet.

Shame Needs an Audience

Aristotle, cataloguing the virtues, called shame aidōs — the fear of disrepute — and thought it fit chiefly for the young, who need the pressure of others’ regard until better habits take hold. The decent and mature person, he reasoned, should have no occasion for shame, having no wish to do shameful things.

But here’s the thing about shame: disrepute requires a public that still disapproves. The feeling was never purely private. It has always depended on an audience whose good opinion you feared to lose. Remove that audience — or worse, replace it with one that cheers — and shame has nothing to grip.

We blush because there are witnesses to our missteps.

The Buyers

We keep asking the shameless whether they have any shame, as though the defect were housed entirely in them. It isn’t.

A politician who runs on his convictions — the criminal kind — has read his market correctly. Shamelessness is a supply that rises to meet a demand.

Shame is a transaction, and every transaction needs a buyer.

The disgraced do not survive in a vacuum; they are returned to office — by us, in numbers large enough to win. We are the market that clears them.

The relevant question is not whether they have any shame left to feel, but whether we have any left to enforce. And we answer it, quietly, every time we reward the very defiance we claim to deplore.

“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

— Mark Twain, 1897

Twain meant the above as a rebuke. But perhaps he was more right than he knew, and in a way he never intended. The involuntary rush of blood to the cheeks that once told the tribe we knew we had transgressed is now firing at nothing

We may not be watching the death of shame so much as waking up from an emergency surgery, discovering that it has been quietly removed, much like an appendix that no one misses.

The question is: can it ever grow back?

There’s so much to learn,

For further reading

• The Rascal King: The Life And Times Of James Michael Curley 1874-1958 by Jack Beatty. Da Capo Press, 1992

• “Have You No Shame?” — the phrase traced from Joseph Welch to the Senate floor, and the argument that shame requires a conscience to register it.

• “Scandal Without Scrutiny” — the same rusting machinery read through Richard III and a summer of viral disgrace.

• “Being a Leader Means Having a Moral Compass” — Margaret Chase Smith’s Declaration of Conscience, and the courage to name the Four Horsemen of Calumny when almost no one else would.

• “From Shame to Self-Awareness” — the lens turned inward, from the failings of others toward the cultivation of one’s own conscience.

• “Scandalous Language” — an Off the Clock wander through the words the world has coined for scandal and calumny.

Also check out our entire section on the topic of integrity

1. “Le Pen says she’ll run for French presidency next year despite court-ordered monitor,” Associated Press, July 7, 2026

2. “Farage Resigns and Says He Will Run Again in Special Election,” The New York Times, July 7, 2026