The Moral Lesson Buried in Last Week’s ‘Blue Wave’

Following a stronger-than-expected showing from Democratic candidates in last week’s elections, there's been a lot of media discourse about what the party can learn from these wins. Much of the focus has been on Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City. Personally, I'm not sure those lessons are too complicated. Running charismatic, media-savvy politicians with an independent streak and message discipline has been something Democrats have excelled at since President John F. Kennedy. God only knows why the party largely gave up on it after President Barack Obama left office. Maybe Mamdani’s success will jog the collective memory.

But there are other, deeper lessons from Tuesday night’s “blue wave,” and an important one comes from Virginia, where 36-year-old Democrat Jay Jones unseated Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares. Attorney general races don’t typically end up on the national stage, but this one did for morbid reasons, and there are some hard lessons for all of us here.

In the lead-up to election day, Jones’ fellow delegate Carrie Coyner leaked a 2022 text message in which he had written that if he had two bullets and could shoot Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, or then–House Speaker Todd Gilbert, Gilbert “gets two bullets to the head.” He later said that Gilbert and his wife are “evil” and “breeding little fascists.”

I want to be clear at the outset here: This is disqualifying, and Jones should have dropped out. Maybe he was just joking, but that does nothing to change my opinion. Jokes like this are a diminishment to the soul. Even setting aside the moral dimension, texting something like this to a member of your opposition party betrays some truly dire political instincts. Virginians don’t just deserve leaders who respect their opponents’ inherent dignity; they deserve an attorney general smart enough to think twice before serving up a scandal this ugly on a silver platter. It is—and I choose this word carefully—shameful. 

Republicans agreed, reacting to the news of Jones’ victory with a mix of horror, despair, and fury. The Dispatch editor in chief Jonah Goldberg posted: “We live in an age where partisans want shamelessness in their candidates rather than punish it.”

“So much for wanting to ‘tone it down,’” bemoaned Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt on X. 

“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat,” Vice President JD Vance posted. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”

Vance was likely referring to Politico’s revelation that several Young Republican leaders have a long history of texting about gas chambers, slavery, and rape. The Vice President hand-waved those revelations away as kids joking around (the oldest of those implicated were in their early to mid-30s, and all are adults). So, he draws a sharp line between the violent texts of young-ish Republicans as defensible and the violent texts of a young-ish Democrat as indefensible. I’d submit that this kind of hypocrisy is also shameful. Or it would be, if anyone had shame anymore.

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Reid J. Epstein, writing for The New York Times, argued in May that we live in a “post-shame” era of politics. I think that’s true, but we’re hardly the first people to do so.

Jeremiah 6:15 tells us that the Israelites “acted shamefully; they committed abomination, yet they were not ashamed.” The prophet Jeremiah then delivers his most contemptuous words: “They did not know how to blush.” The Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift echoed this sentiment in the 1700s: “I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.”

Shame is not a popular feeling. When I was “deconstructing” from evangelicalism, I heard a lot about moving on from shame and how wrong the church had been for relying on shame as a tool. That’s all fair enough. But shame is more than just a tool for manipulation and control, though that is how many of us experience it. Understood rightly, shame is also a sign of self-respect, an appropriate understanding of certain bonds between yourself and others. Shame is what happens when you violate those bonds. As philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò wrote for The Boston Review in September, shame “reminds us of who we want to be when we fall short, a goalpost that is necessarily anchored to the lofty height that our conduct fell beneath.”

I do not think anyone should live in shame, but feeling bad about doing something wrong is a sign of moral maturity. Shame is the feeling of pain you get when you touch a hot stove, telling you you’re in danger. If you’re still feeling pain even though you’re not touching the stove anymore, you should seek healing. If you keep touching a hot stove even though it hurts, something’s wrong. If you can’t even feel the pain while you’re touching it, something’s really wrong. 

I do not think anyone should live in shame, but feeling bad about doing something wrong is a sign of moral maturity.

And I think something is really wrong with us. To bring in an example of what a healthy sense of national shame might look like, the removal of Confederate monuments seemed like a small but positive step forward for the country. It spoke to a healthy sense of shame. It was a sign of a vague understanding of how something in our collective past had tarnished our relationship with others and diminished our collective dignity. It seems bad that we are now restoring many of those monuments.

We could use more of that. We should feel a sense of shame about things like supplying Israel with the weapons to commit genocide in Gaza; we should feel shame as the U.S. military carries out extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. Republicans should feel shame for electing a known sexual predator like President Donald Trump to office. Democrats should feel shame for continuing to welcome a known sex pest like former President Bill Clinton into their circles. Every American should feel shame about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s treatment of immigrants and their allies. In short, America should feel ashamed again. 

I don’t think we’re totally hopeless. Attorney General-elect Jones himself, when confronted with those violent text messages, said, “I’m ashamed, I’m embarrassed, and I’m sorry.” It’s a sign of how sick we are that even just a verbal nod toward feeling shame feels like a step in the right direction, though I maintain that it’s no substitute for dropping out. 

“They did not know how to blush,” Jeremiah said. Maybe that’s still our problem. Not just our sin, but our shamelessness. And until we recover the capacity to feel shame—real, red-faced, stomach-turning shame—we will keep calling evil good, and keep congratulating ourselves for it. A politics without shame can win elections. But it can’t build a country worth living in.