On my third morning in southern Portugal last month, I woke to the breaking news that the country’s prime minister, António Costa, had resigned over rumors of corruption by his majority socialist party. Nothing had been proved, but just the taint of wrongdoing on Costa’s coalition was enough impetus for him to step down.
“No illicit act weighs on my conscience. However, I believe that the dignity of the office of the prime minister is not compatible with any suspicion about your integrity, your good conduct and even less with the practical suspicion of any criminal act. Therefore, in these circumstances, obviously, I presented my resignation,” Costa explained.
The prime minister wasn’t even the sole target of the investigation into his administration’s alleged mishandling of various lithium mining and hydrogen ventures in the country. As Reuters reported, “Prosecutors earlier on Tuesday named Infrastructure Minister Joao Galamba as a formal suspect and detained Costa’s chief of staff.” Also, the head of the prime minister’s office, Vítor Escária, was issued an arrest warrant.
But the citizens of Portugal had lost confidence in Costa’s leadership, and that was sufficient shame to force him to resign his prestigious post.
Meanwhile, across the pond in this increasingly perilous democracy called the United States, members of our government who are accused of lying, acting as a foreign agent or leading a violent insurrection continue to cash taxpayers’ checks while denying, well, everything. They cynically play the legal system with their well-paid attorneys to muddy the waters with delays, countersuits and appeals, all the time acting aggrieved, as if the accusations themselves were politically motivated personal insults to their self-claimed purity.
Have they no shame? The answer is as obvious as the revelations we have on paper, video and recordings that all of us can read, see and hear for ourselves. But gaslighting is all the rage among the political elite.
Face it, my friends. Shame, defined as “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior,” is not a part of American public life.
Let us consider the untalented U.S. Rep. George Santos from New York who is facing a 23-count federal indictment and a third expulsion vote from the Republican-led House, whose ethics committee issued a damning resolution. Among the charges are wire fraud in connection with a fraudulent political contribution scheme, unlawful monetary transactions in connection with the wire fraud allegations and theft of public money.
Santos, a Republican, said he would not seek another term, but he refuses to resign. He called the bipartisan report a “politicized smear” and then posted on X: “If there was a single ounce of ETHICS in the ‘Ethics committee,’ they would have not released this biased report.”
Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, a hoarder of gold bars and thick wads of stashed cash, has been indicted on charges that he acted as a foreign agent for Egypt’s government by helping that country grease lucrative arms deals with the United States in exchange for loads of filthy lucre. Allegedly, Menendez and his wife, Nadine Arslanian, received “hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes” from the Egyptian government in exchange for his influence as then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In the wake of this indictment, will Menendez do the right thing and step down? Not a chance. Here was the expected response from the senator: “Anyone who knows my record, knows this latest charge is as outrageous as it is absurd. I have been, throughout my life, loyal to only one country — the United States of America, the land my family chose to live in democracy and freedom.”
Unlike norms elsewhere, a transgression or, more precisely among many American public servants, breaking the law for personal gain, rarely results in losing face or dishonoring one’s extended family or community.
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We view collectivism negatively, at odds with our rugged frontier individualism. Yet, our actions do affect all of us. The lack of shame in the wake of the lies that Santos allegedly told to bolster his thin resume and propel him to a seat in Congress does affect the greater community. Menendez’s refusal to step down for the good of the Senate while the cloud of corruption hovers overhead is selfish.
We citizens lose confidence in the our democracy. We disengage. Without a common good, we are alone, adrift on the frontier.
I believe a lack of shame, a dearth of awareness of the impact of one’s actions, makes a political leader reckless and dangerous. For whose interests is that politician really looking out?
Democracy is, or should be, a government by the people and for the people. But without the guardrail of shame to constrain the worst profiteering instincts of our lawmakers, we are susceptible to a form of government that is anything but democratic.
Stephen J. Lyons is the author of six books of reportage and essays, most recently “Searching for Home: Misadventures with Misanthropes.”
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