I read Toby Buckle’s long essay on the politics of humiliation. I found it interesting even though it has some serious shortcomings. I kept coming back to two central themes of Friedrich Nietzsche’s teachings, which are the psychological roles and power dynamics of shame and resentment. Of the two, I agree with Mark Alfano, that too little scholarly attention is paid to Nietzsche’s approach to shame.

Buckle’s thesis is that much of the appeal of Trumpism arises from people’s desire to dominate and humiliate others. His main example is a hypothetical interaction between “Mark—45, white, causally but nicely dressed, in shorts and slip on shoes with an expensive watch” and Fatima “25 years old and is in her second week working as a barista in a chain coffee store.” The store is busy, Fatima is a trainee, and she screws up Mark’s order. Mark then embarks on a rather relentless criticism which is clearly aimed at bolstering his own ego and status at Fatima’s expense.

This interaction is a small part of Mark’s day, immediately forgotten. But once the customer rush is over, Fatima cries in the break room. The sense of humiliation is lasting and harmful.

These kinds of interactions are common, and made possible by power dynamics. If Fatima owned the coffee store, she could shift the humiliation onto this customer by kicking him out. But Mark knows who he is dealing with and that he has the power to behave with open contempt.

For Buckle, this kind of power dynamic is almost like a fantasy for the MAGA horde.

It’s often opined that Trump would be more effective if he were capable of some restraint. That a truly dangerous autocrat would mask his designs better. This not only misses a huge part of his appeal, but what one of the central aims of this movement is.

Many millions of Americans love Trump because he routinely humiliates people. It validates their own actions. They live vicariously though him, imagining the humiliation they could inflict if they were given greater power. He also normalizes the behaviour. The symbolic power of having someone of his open sadism in the Oval Office is massive. It is changing our society, making humiliation much more acceptable, and corroding the norms that partially restrain humiliators.

That humiliation is toxic is perhaps Buckle’s main thesis, and it’s a good one. But there are some chicken and egg problems with his argument. Does Trump’s movement have power because people seek permission to dominate and humiliate or does it have power because people who have been dominated and humiliated seek revenge?

Perhaps the correct answer is that this is a cycle that perpetuates itself.

Many have observed that Barack Obama humiliated Trump at a White House Correspondents Dinner, which motivated Trump to run for president and powered his thirst for revenge. Of course, Obama was responding to Trump’s relentless questioning of his birth certificate, which was an effort to belittle him. Others have frequently observed that Trump’s upbringing in Queens gave him an inferiority complex about the Manhattan elite, which he both sought to join and to humiliate. It’s this outsider status that his supporters pick up on and which allows them to see a very rich and powerful man as somehow representative of themselves and their own struggles. That Trump has experienced crushing humiliation throughout his life explains a lot. It does not excuse his behavior, but it does validate the idea that humiliation is toxic.

Looked at another way, we’re all familiar with the stereotypical man who is dominated at work and responds by coming home and beating his wife and kids. At least in one area of his life, he has the power to dominate and this makes him feel better, even if only temporarily. What Buckle is essentially saying is that the MAGA horde doesn’t have this kind of power and so it substitutes the vicarious enjoyment of watching Trump dominate. In this way, the people they’d like to dominate get the comeuppance they’d like to deliver themselves.

But are Mark and Fatima really the best examples of this dynamic. Mark actually has power and can exercise it on his own. Perhaps Fatima responds by going home and kicking her dog, allowing her to feel a sense of power. What’s missing here are the roles of shame and resentment.

There’s a sense in which Buckle and Nietzche’s ideas align. Buckle argues:

To start with, the converse of domination is often taken to be freedom. There is a long tradition in political philosophy of defining freedom as not being dominated. That to be free, it is not enough to not have anyone actively interfering with you, there shouldn’t even be anyone in a position to use power over you in an arbitrary and unaccountable way. The story I’ve told [of Mark and Fatima] buttresses that: If domination is persistently used to humiliate, and humiliation is harmful, then that’s yet another reason to avoid domination.

I think it also tells us something about the nature of domination. It’s not just that it has bad effects, or that it can be abused, there’s something intrinsically inhuman about it.

Compare that to Nietzsche’s aphorisms 273-275 from his 1887 book The Gay Science:

Whom dost thou call Bad? Him who always wants to put others to shame.
What dost thou think most humane? To spare a person shame.
What is the Seal of becoming free? To be no longer ashamed of oneself.

Shame and humiliation are inextricably entwined but they are not the same things. For Nietzsche, fear of humiliation is regulated by anticipatory shame. This is shame in the good sense. If knowing that an action will cause you disgrace dissuades you from taking that action, then shame is serving a useful societal purpose. But Nietzsche sees the toxicity in shame, too. There’s a shame associated with being pitied. For this reason, being the recipient of benevolence can be painful. If freedom is defined as not being ashamed of oneself, receiving public charity can be a form of bondage, and giving charity can be a form of dominance and even cruelty.

So, for example, it is better to give anonymously than to make an ostentatious display of your generosity. This is one of the rare examples where Nietszche’s teachings align with Jesus’. From Matthew 6:1-4:

1. Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. 2 “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Jesus isn’t explicit that this will spare the recipients shame, but it’s still a critique of seeking to take advantage of power advantages over others.

Where Buckle has identified the desire to dominate as the main problem, Nietzsche has identified freedom from shame as the goal. What’s insightful, I think, is that toxic shame can be inflicted even with seemingly good motives and doesn’t necessarily indicate cruelty or meanness.

Separate but related to this is resentment. Humiliation is the main driver of resentment. Nietzsche often approached this from what I’d term a right-wing perspective. For him, the entire theology of Christianity and much of its ethics was derived from the humiliation of the powerless and their desire for revenge. He called it a “slave-morality” and contrasted it with a “master morality” that he associated with the Roman upper classes.

Without getting into a treatise on this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, I think we can see it in action by how people reacted to murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione. So many people in this country have been made to feel helpless by the health insurance industry that there was an outpouring of support from Mangione even though he shot and killed the father of two young sons on the street. This is what resentment can do. But this resentment was built on the shame and humiliation of being dominated.

What we have here with Buckle and Nietzsche are two different approaches to examining power dynamics. Nietzsche’s has its shortcomings, but Buckle’s is a little muddled. To focus solely on Mark, he never asks what kind of humiliation he has suffered that may explain his desire to dominate and humiliate. But this is really a key element of understanding populism in politics. Buckle has taken this question out of the equation by having Mark begin with no history as simply a white man with casual attire and an expensive watch. He’s privileged, in other words, and can’t possibly have any legitimate grievances.

This is actually a form of dismissiveness that in itself has a lot to do with the power of MAGA. Whole categories of people are downgraded, their opinions disrespected, their experiences dismissed, all based on their identity. But the truly privileged are very few, and most people have suffered humiliations and indignities, and that means most people have resentments and want things set right.

Perhaps Mark will never be a sympathetic person, but the truth is that everyone has a history. As for Fatima, if she really does go home and kick her dog, does all the blame for that fall on Mark? We’re all people with a desire to be respected, but also with insecurities that can lead us to misbehave.

The use of Mark as a a MAGA archetype doesn’t quite fit. If he’s living vicariously through Trump, that’s a part of the story we are not told that involves areas of his life where he is the dominated rather than the dominator.

I think these power dynamics are basically an unavoidable part of being human in any society. Political populism is really a way of channeling the resulting resentment into political power. In this sense, populism is neutral, neither good nor bad. It can result in an uptick in racism or a sudden support for murdering business executives in the street. But it can also result in a more generous social safety net, a moral equal society, and less shame and feelings of powerlessness.

I’ve been writing for years that when left-wing populism retreats, fascism steps into the breach. This is for a basic reason. Insofar as the right-wing represents the interests of monied classes, it will always be outnumbered and at a political disadvantage in a democratic system. Right-wing populism, therefore, cannot rely simply on rallying the masses. It must set the masses against themselves. When there is no left-wing outlet for resentment, the resentment is easily captured by undemocratic forces. That’s where we are now.

That doesn’t mean left-wing populism is necessarily good or harmless. Populism in all forms is dangerous. But the regulator for minimizing that danger is the system built up within the representative form of government. It’s norms and regulations and courts and the Constitution. These are the things right-wing populism will discard without much thought. This is what we’re seeing now.

Let me close with this. Lake Research did a deep-dive on why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election and discovered that there was a big drop off of broadly progressive voters who became disconnected from the Democratic Party during Joe Biden’s presidency. These voters are big fans of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They are most concerned with the cost of living, “expanding affordable health insurance, taxing the ultra-wealthy, and eliminating junk fees.” Never mind that the Biden administration’s policies included bolstering the IRS to tax the ultra-wealthy and having the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Trade Commission eliminate junk fees. The point is that, rightly or wrongly, left-wing resentment did not find a champion in the Biden-Harris team. Those motivated by resentment stayed home or moved to the party that was most obviously populist in its messaging.

I think a true autopsy would show that Harris lost through a combination of real and imaged failures to channel people’s resentment. On a longer scale, the Democrats lost the white working class, including a healthy percentage of the labor movement, through similar failures. This isn’t a judgment on whether left-wing populist ideas are good or bad, but more an observation that a left-wing governing party cannot succeed or fight off fascism if it concedes populism to the right.

There are just too many people who have suffered shame and humiliation and feel resentment to think you can win elections without offering to be instruments of their revenge. I don’t believe MAGA is a movement of the privileged. It’s a movement of the shamed and humiliated and dominated.

But that’s at the bottom. That’s where it gets the votes to win. At the top, it is very much a bunch of masters seeking to maintain their position of dominance, along with all the associated advantages.  They get their power by harvesting the humiliation of the dominated. This is why democracy cannot be saved by heaping shame on MAGA. That kind of shame is the fuel of the movement. The only way out is to rechannel resentment, and that begins by crafting an attractive populist alternative.

Remember this when you hear Democratic consultants council against extremism.