Moral Shame

David Brooks has been a strong conservative and moral voice in America for decades. His list of achievements and accolades is long. In The Atlantic of April 7, 2025, he wrote this in an article entitled “I Should Have Seen This Coming”.

“Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness – on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause.

Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely – toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office – I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.”

It has struck me for years that those of us who have lived seriously in other cultures have a different view of the United States than most Americans do. I call it, of course, “nuanced”.

We have seen and experienced the way the US has dominated cultures and, in many cases, exploited them. We have seen how the US has exercised raw power to work its will on the world. We have seen some of the terrible effects of America’s lust for wealth and dominance. We have seen America’s propensity toward racism. We have lived with the results of militarism and climate change driven, to a large extent, by American dominance.

I’m sure David Brooks knows this too. I’m sure that, if asked, he also would be more nuanced than he is in these comments about America’s “goodness”, America’s “grand and heroic enterprise”, our noble daily lives.

It is, as all history is, a mixed bag. The Dutch are genuinely grateful for the way the Allies liberated them and Europe from Nazism. They - and Europe - experienced America’s goodness, “heroic enterprise” and a certain level of “nobility” during and in the aftermath of WWII. And yet today, most Dutch are suspicious and critical of the way the United States conducts itself in the world.

Since the election of November 6 and the inauguration of January 20 it seems like something seismic has changed. Whatever was heroic, noble or grand seems to have been jettisoned, not only by Donald Trump (he has never been a grand, noble or heroic person), but by a majority of the country, including white evangelical Christians.

The anguish, grief and shock many of us experience is the realization that Trump is not a bug, he’s a feature (to quote Kristen Kobes DuMez and others). Many have noted that Trump is not the cause of the vile behavior – he is the fruit of it. We are having to face the fact that, when push comes to shove, when our identity, power, influence and position are on the line, we will behave vilely to cling to them.

Moral shame. No longer is it for historical events we look back on with embarrassment. No longer is it for the themes of materialism, racism and violence that continue to plague us even as we nobly battle against them. No longer is it for the fluke that one awful man could, through an accident of electoral college politics, become president for a term.

Moral shame – for those of us who have it - is for what current events reveal about who we really are. The shock is the realization is that these are my people. This is where I come from, and this is who they really are, taken as a group. It is embarrassing and painful.