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One episode from McKay Coppins’s recent profile on Stephen Miller has been haunting me since I read it. Early in Miller’s work with the Trump administration, he collaborated with Steve Bannon to craft the first version of the travel ban designed to prevent “travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries” (using Coppins’s description). I’ll quote Coppins from here:

The hastily written order contained no guidance on implementation, and soon after Trump signed it—on a Friday afternoon one week into his presidency—airports across the country were plunged into chaos. Hundreds of travelers were detained, civil-rights lawyers descended, and protesters swarmed. To many, the televised disarray was proof of failure. But according to Michael Wolff’s account of the Trump administration’s first year, Fire and Fury, the architects of the ban were tickled by the hysteria; Bannon (who was Wolff’s main source) boasted that they’d chosen to enact the disruptive measure on a weekend “so the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.” They counted the anger on display as a political win.

What haunts me about this story is Bannon’s terrifying tactical brilliance in gaming what I’m going to call basic human decency. In the grand game of chess that is political discourse in the United States, Bannon (and Miller, who unlike Bannon still works in the White House) seem to me to have cannily outflanked people committed to the norms of civil discourse. I think it’s a commonplace at this point among people who oppose Trump to believe that his appeal lies largely in the frankness with which he expresses (or crassly manipulates) the id of his followers. But the travel ban episode suggests that Trump’s success also lies in playing the superegos of his opponents. All of the stuff that to us betokens civilization, which is to say, the very substance of any anti-Trump protest grounded in appeals to things like decency, democratic norms, basic Christianity, and the like—all of this leaves us perpetually a move behind the administration and its strategists, who stand ready to laugh the moment their provocation sends us to Twitter or to the streets, quaintly chattering about things like the place of persuasion in civil discourse.

People have been commenting for years about Trump’s imperviousness to shame. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth noting how centrally shame figures in the administration’s tactics. Even as the administration channels its supporters’ sense of having been shamed for decades by “coastal elites” and gaining energy from the resulting rage, its political response to this shame has simply been to turn the tables and use shame to delegitimate the other side’s values through the “snowflake” appellation, a professed taste for leftist tears, and so on.

I’m going to suggest that responding effectively to these tactics is less a matter of cerebral education than emotional intelligence. I think that the administration’s approach is impoverished on this front in a way that gives those of us who care about things like basic human decency an opening. Building here on Erinn Gilson’s excellent recent book, The Ethics of Vulnerability (I didn’t say we were leaving the cerebral behind…), we can think beyond the common understanding of vulnerability as susceptibility to harm and recognize that vulnerability also grounds our capacity for human connection. This shared, ontological, vulnerability connects me with the people currently suffering under the administration’s inhumane border policies, even as our politically conditioned, situated vulnerabilities differ markedly. Because our outrage over these policies (I say “our” advisedly, in light of recent comment threads on this blog) amounts to acknowledging vulnerability, it exposes us to the administration’s shaming tactics.

This looks like an argument for shutting down our vulnerability, but if vulnerability is indeed ontological, that turns out not to be possible. In this light, the administration’s use of shaming tactics and professed shamelessness emerges as a carefully constructed, but ultimately untenable, effort at attaining invulnerability. By laughing at decency, they are attempting to situate themselves outside the realm of political vulnerability as usually understood. As evidenced by Trump’s ability to survive scandal after scandal that would have destroyed any other politician’s career several times over, this strategy has been wildly effective so far.

The hard thing about countering this strategy is that verbal appeals to decency and the like aren’t enough. They may even be counterproductive, just more leftist tears to supply Reddit’s unquenchable thirst. The only effective response is actually becoming decent people, and holding onto that decency in the face of strong political incentives to abandon it. The mere political presentation of decency won’t do.

“Decency” is admittedly a fuzzy term, so let me clarify. I mean by it something like what Rowan Williams means by empathy: it’s not saying “I know what you feel,” but rather “I have no idea what you feel.” Breaking this down a bit, there’s a risk of appropriation at work in overidentifying with other people’s suffering (see: Rachel Dolezal). There’s also a counter-risk in failing to identify with their experience at all (see Judith Butler’s argument about which lives count as grievable). Gilson’s thought about vulnerability offers a way through this dilemma: if we all share ontological vulnerability, acknowledging as much affords us a meaningful human connection with others. Recognizing that situational vulnerabilities vary from person to person sets boundaries that protect everyone’s relative autonomy and make possible a kind of mutuality that incorporates real difference.

In these terms, kindness means acting toward others in ways that draw on and appeal to our shared vulnerabilities, but that also require careful listening along the (never completed) path to understanding someone else’s situational vulnerabilities. Kindness means building the trust that enables us to navigate the balance between letting another person assume the leadership of her own life and telling her the truth when she doesn’t want to hear it. Kindness makes it possible for us to forgive each other and find reconciliation when we get these things wrong, as we inevitably will. Kindness empowers us to see each other as human beings, and to feel seen as such. Crucially, given shame’s current political power, kindness heals the effects of shame by acknowledging the fundamental worthiness of the other. It responds to the blind spot in Stephen Miller’s trollish political strategy by using our very susceptibility to shame as an opportunity to affirm each other’s humanity in ways that create the possibility for just and loving relationships that do not feed into the tragic cycle of shame, resentment, and rage.

As a political strategy, kindness is terribly unsatisfying. It’s a strategy to which winning elections (important as that is) may be tertiary at best. It’s impractical, it has no obvious bearing on the cut-and-thrust of policy debate, and it’s useless for winning arguments on the internet. On the other hand, given the way that the Trump administration and its acolytes have managed to structure our political culture, I think it’s all we have left.