With Belonging & Acceptance For All

Instead of shaming MAGA voters, we ought to accept and bring them to our side.

Since 2016, there’s been a growing trend within the Democratic Party towards shaming people we disagree with. This inclination seems to be due to Democrats not knowing how to respond to Donald Trump and his voters.¹ Thus, in the absence of a better strategy, or perhaps an unwillingness to adopt one, Democrats have often resorted to shaming the MAGA leader and his base.

While we Democrats may know that the motivation behind this strategy is ultimately rooted in good values— liberty, equality, justice, and inclusivity— to name a few, millions of Americans do not know this to be true. Despite our best efforts and noblest of intentions, in fact, this shame-based strategy has proven rather unsuccessful.

Fortunately, there’s a better approach we can take, one that centers on belonging and acceptance. This message not only aligns much more with our values but is also more politically beneficial to us.²

In this piece, we’ll look at how shame functions in human society and American politics; what makes it a bad political strategy; and what Democrats can do instead.

Shame in Human Society

The feeling of shame likely developed in humans to minimize reputational damage to oneself. It may be adaptive in that it encourages behaviors that are good for social cohesion.³ However, it can also be maladaptive since it engenders behaviors like defensiveness and avoidance.⁴

Shame is a self-focused emotion. Shame makes people feel bad about who they are, rather than about something they did. Where guilt encourages empathy for another person, shame focuses one’s attention inward on oneself. In other words, shaming someone is not a good way to get them to care about you or what you care about.

Moreover, compared to guilt, shame makes people less motivated to make up for their transgressions.⁵ This is because “when individuals commit a moral transgression, those who are prone to shame are more likely to respond with anger and avoidance rather than empathy and apology, which could repair the damage that is caused by the transgression.”⁶

Shame in American Politics

While people are motivated by the desire for truth, we also want to see ourselves as “good and reasonable people” according to Keith Payne, PhD. He explains, “A lot of the thinking we do is aimed at reassuring ourselves that we are good members of our social group; that we are good and reasonable people; and that the people in our groups that mean a lot to us are as well.”⁷

In this way, humans are motivated to defend our in-group, or our “side” of the political divide. Thus, when Democrats shame a group of people, we put distance between ourselves and those within that group. This is especially true considering that, most of the time, people’s political leanings seem to be determined by their group identity more so than by their ideology.⁸

Within the Democratic Party, this shame-based politics is exempliified by Democratic members of Congress chanting shaming at their Republican counterparts; Hillary Clinton calling half of Trump voters a “basket of deplorables” in 2016; and Kamala Harris telling someone, “you’re at the wrong rally,” as she was delivering her campaign stump speech in 2024.⁹

Shame Loses Elections

Here’s the problem: When Democrats shame people, we tell them, “Go away. You’re not one of us. You don’t belong. You’re not welcome here. We don’t want you here.”¹⁰ These messages effectively tell people, “Don’t vote for us! We don’t have your back. We aren’t here for you.” None of these is exactly a winning slogan.

In this light, it seems Democrats need to reverse course in our messaging. We can and ought to say to everyone, “Stay. You are one of us. You do belong. You are welcome here. We do want you here.” All of these messages say, “Vote for us! We’ve got your back. We’re here for you,” which is a more effective message.

Politics is a human enterprise. Therefore, we ought to view political actors through a human lens, which is to say that, while people can endeavor to make political judgements and decisions based on logical reasoning, most of us also act on emotion. Therefore, we ought to take people’s feelings into account when we’re trying to win them over.

Belongingness, an Alternative to Shame

As humans, each of us has a fundamental need to belong. We want and need to feel as though we are a part of a group that’s bigger than ourselves. In a political context, this group often takes the form of a political party— the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Yet, it can also take the form of a country, where people feel patriotic when we feel connected to our identity as Americans.

According to Clayton Chin, “belonging is both a status, something held, and a practice, the ability to navigate the symbols, ideas and institutions of a group.” Having a sense of belonging requires recognition and identity as being within the group and seen within and by the group. It means that we are able to understand and to be able to be understood by those in our group.¹¹

Many people feel like aspects of Democratic Party politics, American culture, and perhaps just modern society, are out of reach and out of touch with their lives. Yes, the Biden-Harris administration sought to improve the lives of American works through X, Y, and Z policies, which is great. What’s missing is the connection and the recognition.¹²

This explains, for instance, the Obama-Trump voters whose jobs have been displaced by globalization. By promising to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., Trump was recognizing these workers’ plight in the workforce and their dignity in their work. Rather than scoff at this dynamic, we ought to take from it the parts we agree with, the parts that Democrats have traditionally done.

Acceptance

Millions of Democratic-leaning Americans voted MAGA because they didn’t feel seen or respected by the Democratic Party. We ought to accept that reality; we ought to own up to that reality to the voters we lost; and then, we ought to change that reality for future elections.

We can do this in many ways. One would be accepting that some of the beliefs we find untenable are okay. To do this, we need not agree with them per se, but we ought not automatically write people off as bigots for holding them.

Democrats have a tendency to “beg the question,” which is to say to insist that people affirmatively declare their commitment to any number of progressive beliefs and policy prescriptions. We ought to reduce the extent to which we do this. People can think and believe what they want; it’s how they vote that matters politically. More importantly, we can’t and shouldn’t want to control what people think.

As Democrats, I think it’s fair to say we believe in diversity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. In this case, let’s live by our values. Let’s welcome a multitude of diverse, diverging perspectives since that’s what it means to support these things.

***

We can't shame people into agreeing with us, but maybe we can invite them to join us and persuade them.

Making people feel like they belong and therefore ought to do good is infinitely more constructive than shaming people into feeling like they don’t belong and just are bad.

We ought to want everyone to feel like they belong and are accepted. I think many of us already do; I know I do.

Obligatory Disclaimer: all views expressed here are my own personal views and do not represent the views of my employer nor those of the U.S. government.

Thank you for reading!

Sidesnotes/Other Considerations

Awareness — When we speak to one person or one group, our message may go far beyond its originally-intended audience. Thus, when we speak, we are speaking to people beyond our current audience. This is only more true in our current information environment. Therefore, political candidates especially ought to be vigilant about what they say and know that it may make its way all around the internet and the world.

Extremism — Shame can fuel extremism by alienating people from mainstream society and pushing them towards extremist groups, like neo-nazis and incels, who will accept them because they want more members.¹³

Polarization — In our polarized era, many people are motivated by negative polarization, i.e., dislike of the other party rather than like of their own party. Moreover, our country has sorted more and more along party lines in the past few decades, meaning that we have fewer cross cutting identities over which we could bond with people.

Bibliography

1. Andrea Estrada-UCSB, “Why did we evolve to feel shame?” futurity.org, September 17, 2018.

2. Baumeister, Roy F. "Need-to-belong theory." Handbook of theories of social psychology 2 (2012): 121-140.

3. Chin, Clayton. "The concept of belonging: Critical, normative and multicultural." Ethnicities 19, no. 5 (2019): 715-739.

4. Hillman, James G., Devin I. Fowlie, and Tara K. MacDonald. "Social verification theory: A new way to conceptualize validation, dissonance, and belonging." Personality and Social Psychology Review 27, no. 3 (2023): 309-331.

5. Kim I. Mills, “Speaking of Psychology: What’s the difference between guilt and shame? With June Tangney, PhD,” Episode 255 of the “Speaking of Psychology” Podcast, American Psychological Association, September 2023. apa.org. Access the Spotify link.

6. Kim I. Mills & Keith Payne, PhD, “The psychology behind our political divide, with Keith Payne, PhD,”

7. Terrizzi and Shook, “On the Origin of Shame: Does Shame Emerge From an Evolved Disease-Avoidance Architecture?” frontiersin.org.

8. “The evolution of shame and its display”

Footnotes

1. and perhaps also resentment towards them, though I’m not convinced this is the primary motivator for Democratic politicians and strategists.

2. Democrats ought to spread a message focused on belonging and acceptance. For Americans we see as our people and equally, for MAGA voters. America doesn’t need to be exclusive for us; in fact, it’s better when all voices are heard and recognized.

3. It tells us when we’ve done something that will make our tribe not accept us, which is good to know. In this way, shame enforces social hierarchies and existing social norms, i.e., the status quo, which isn’t working out in our favor as Democrats now. More to the point, shame, in this way, seems much more aligned to conservative ways of engaging in politics.

4. Shame makes people get defensive since it challenges one’s worthiness and goodness as a person. We all believe we are good people with good intentions— we are all the heroes of our own stories. Telling people otherwise is insisting they believe something they know to be false.

5. This info comes from an interview with June Tangney, PhD, Professor of Psychology at George Mason University (see Bibliography). She also noted that shame is often out of proportion with the thing that caused the shame; in other words, people feel worse than the situation calls for.

6. That is according to Terrizzi and Shook, who discuss this on page 2 of “On the Origin of Shame” (see Bibliography).

7. This is an example of motivated reasoning, which can thus be considered a part of our “psychological immune system” in that it is a psychological mechanism that enables us to defend our sense of self. This statement reminds me of Trump saying, “There were very fine people on both sides” when asked about white nationalists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlotteville in August 2017. [note to self: insert link to clip]

8. Since we as humans form our political views and affiliations around our identities, it makes sense that we don’t like being shamed for them.

9. I will likely unpack that moment in a later piece if not later in this one. Many Dems in Congress have also held up strongly-worded signs while many rank-and-file Democrats, for our part, have furthered the shame-based approach with strongly-worded messages of mockery and shame online and distancing ourselves from MAGA voters in real life, too.

10. To be clear, I think Republicans can do, and definitely used to do, more shaming of people who aren’t like them. Indeed, shame has historically been used to enforce conservative social norms, particularly conservative Christian social norms. Therefore, it’s interesting that many of the people now shaming MAGA voters were likely themselves on the receiving end of shame from those voters. One would think in such cases, the shamed would not want to become like the shamer, but unfortunately, that sometimes is what happens.

11. Read more on this in “The Concept of Belonging,” pgs 2-3 (see Bibliography).

12. This is frustrating because it doesn’t actually require any change in policy and, therefore, it should theoretically be quite easy.

13. If the Trump era has taught us nothing, hopefully it will have taught us that ignoring fringe views from fringe figures doesn’t work. It doesn’t work to make those views go away, nor does it work to make those people go away, the latter of which is in itself a dubious goal.