On the value of directing social shame and cultural pressure onto fascists - an amazing essay from fall 2025
Today is the first that I’ve read this incisive and coherent essay in the Boston Review by Associate Professor of Philosophy Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. He says Common decency stigmatizes people who do not participate in it—removes them from voluntary association, as Russell exemplified. We indeed have to live with one another, but terms and conditions apply.
It is quite relevant and thought-provoking in the arena of discussions we have today on DU:
*The pain of dealing with relatives with atrocious views and warped values.
*The nature of the attack on ‘woke’ from the right.
*The willingness of elite collaborators to normalize fascists
*Contrasting ‘talking to everyone’ and being silent about ‘cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and sadistic persecution’
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-can-we-live-together/
How Can We Live Together?
Ezra Klein is wrong: shame is essential.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
In 1962, eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell received a series of letters from Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, inviting him to a debate. Russell not only declined the invitation but replied quite generally that “nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us”—since “every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterized the philosophy and practice of fascism.”
Today we face political forces that are pursuing a campaign of mass deportations, federal occupations, and extrajudicial military executions of civilians without trial. Perhaps these forces are best described as “fascist,” as Mosley had labeled his supporters; perhaps they are better described with some other term of art or likened to some other particular regime responsible for the horrors of the twentieth century. But such debates are, at best, academic. Whatever noun we use to label the “cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution” of our day, we are confronted with a set of choices about what and whom to associate with that are not entirely different from the ones Russell confronted.
[…]Much about what [Ezra] Klein offers here is objectionable: the appeal to debate as “persuasion,” which confuses the mere appearance of giving and responding to reasons with the substance of good-faith rational inquiry; the silence about the fact that the watchlist Kirk spearheaded generated death threats, along with other evidence that would complicate the narrative that Kirk did politics the “right way”; the breathtaking carelessness or outright dishonesty in deflecting objections to the specific accuracy of this portrayal of Kirk with claims about the general appropriateness of political violence. Klein has himself spoken cogently about the risks and rewards of the attention economy in shaping real-world politics, saying that “attention is the most important human faculty” since a person’s life is simply “the sum total of the things you’ve paid attention to.” For him to ignore this much in order to lend the weight of his considerably large audience to volunteer as participant in a state-sponsored propaganda offensive is, at best, deeply irresponsible.
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