There was a time when shame played an important role in public life. It kept the system intact. A leader might lie or spew hate, but not without cost. The collective would respond. A rebuke, a cold shoulder, a quiet, forced resignation. Shame had teeth. It made norms real.

That time has passed. Today, to have shame, which is another way of saying “to have a conscience,” is to be weak. The unwritten rules that once steadied American democracy—conceding elections, respecting judicial independence, accepting the rights of the free press—have been shattered.

Norms depended on people caring how they were seen. What happens when leaders no longer flinch?

The collapsed restraint is visible everywhere.

In courts, where major Supreme Court rulings now arrive unsigned and unexplained. In elections, where losing no longer means conceding. In Congress, where the expectation of honorable conduct has long since given way to performance even resulting in injury.

The military, once held apart from domestic politics, is ordered into policing cities. An organized campaign to gerrymander election districts to unfairly gain Congressional seats creates an arms race. The office of the presidency, in earlier times careful and gracious with the language of grief, uses the death of an ally to promise vengeance and to criminalize dissent. Rhetoric once reserved for fringe figures—”civil war,” “treason,” “enemies of the people”—flows daily from the highest offices.

Each breach comes not with consequence, but with applause and fundraising. What once brought disgrace now brings airtime. The old idea that certain things simply are not done has given way to a newer logic—if it is possible, and politically useful, then why not?

This leads to nowhere good: increasing, incited violence.

Laws cannot cover every possibility. Ethics, said Lord Moulton, is “obedience to the unenforceable.” The wheels stay on because there are moments when leaders choose not to go further than they could. To accept a loss rather than invent a win. To abide by rules rather than weaken them.

We are now being forced to adjust to the impotence of norms. Each breach, like a ratchet, becomes precedent. We lose the expectation that public power or platforms will be exercised with any care. What replaces it is not lawlessness, but a calculating logic: not “is this right?” but “can I get away with this?”

The dangers of this shift are not hypothetical. When political violence rises, when threats against officials go unchallenged, when even elected leaders hesitate to speak because of the risks—they are not simply being cautious. They are responding rationally to the evaporation of a norm, now quaint, that people can act in the public square without fear for their safety or their family’s. Not just public officials, but everyday people are at risk, from fellow citizens and from the state.

When grief is weaponized, when militaries are turned inward, when opponents are cast as enemies of the state, the door opens to oppression. At each stage, the abandonment of restraint makes the next step easier, until there is no step left to resist.

Democracy has never been sustained by laws alone. It has always also needed restraint. That is vanishing and, with it, the guardrails that kept politics from turning into war.

War, after all, is politics by other means.

We are living on the edge of collapse. This is not just about what leaders do. It is about what we will accept. We, the people, must demand adherence to the rule of law—a position that, ironically, demands the return of norms to enforce that adherence.

I fear that if we do not act collectively, through voice and action, we will be left with no norms at all.