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They Have No Shame

You Can’t Win People Over With Shame….You Must Do It With Persuasion

Stephen P. Watkins
6 min readNov 7, 2020
Copyright November 9, 2017 ActionForHappiness.org

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won their contest to be the 46th President and Vice President of the United States. That’s great news, but it’s tempered by the realization that a little over 70 million people voted for the current Occupant of the White House, President Donald J. Trump. That figure constitutes a larger voter result than Trump got in 2016.

After four + years of his incessant lies, hatred, bile, xenophobia, misogyny, and religious bigotry, haven’t we all had enough? Not all of us; more than 70 million people were happy to seek his reelection last Tuesday.

Have they no shame? Apparently not.

You can’t win people over with shame — you must do it with persuasion.

Our country’s psychological history had a lot of shame elements in its foundation: sexual, religious, pro-/anti-slavery, pro-/anti-English (Establishment), and the like. “Shame” was the internalized feeling that people didn’t “like” you, that what you did was wrong and thus you were worthy of ostracization. This made us conform to certain standards of behavior….

….that is, until the development of “identity politics,” which grew out of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Then, leaders of…

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Stephen P. Watkins
Stephen P. Watkins

Written by Stephen P. Watkins

Top Writer in Politics. Author of “The ‘Plenty’ Book — the Answer to the Question: What Can I do to Make This a Better World?,” available on Amazon.com

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