The problem with people who lack knowledge and critical thinking ability is that they make poor decisions and are easily fooled and manipulated. However, Justin Kruger and David Dunning (1999) famously noted that such people face a double burden: not only are they unskilled thinkers, but they are also blind to their own lack of skill. They called this state “unskilled and unaware of it”—and observers have dubbed it the Dunning-Kruger effect—which leads folks to overestimate their abilities and intelligence, making them indifferent to their incompetence and hard to convince that they are wrong.
As awful and dangerous a state as that is to be in (for them and for the rest of us), perhaps even more reprehensible are those opinion-shapers and policy-makers who are quick to exploit it. What we see today in American (and certainly other countries’) politics is leaders and other public figures who lack basic principles of honesty or decency, or of any guiding rationale for their actions, and any apparent sense of guilt over this lack. We will call them unprincipled and unashamed (while often proudly aware of it).
Politics has never been an arena of principles. Granted, political players often appeal to principles, such as freedom or rights, and sometimes try to make their utterances and actions appear principled. However, it is essential to understand that politics is fundamentally about advantage, not about principles, and that principles positively get in the way of politically advantageous action; indeed, principles are intended to prevent individuals, parties, and other interest groups from (ab)using and maximizing their advantage. The main feature or quality of principles is their universality: they should apply in all situations and equally to all participants, the powerful and weak, the majority and the minority, alike. They are among what people these days refer to as the “guardrails” of a just and democratic society.
So, politicians have always struggled with (or against) principles and to mask their naked advantage in a cloak of principle, but the scale of unprincipled and unashamed conduct among contemporary American Republicans has reached an unprecedented and largely previously unimaginable level. It first became glaringly obvious to me in the refusal of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to hold confirmation hearings for Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in March 2016. With a knowing smirk, McConnell insisted that the next president should choose the Supreme Court Justice—on the partisan hope that a Republican would be the next president—even though Obama still had almost a year left in his term and had every right and authority to name the next Justice.
Anyhow, that was the “principle” on which McConnell justified his action, which was nothing more than an exercise of his advantage (as head of the Senate’s Republican majority) and permitted Republicans to extend and institutionalize that advantage when Trump got to appoint the Justice instead. To prove that Republican machinations were totally unprincipled and unashamed, when liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020—even closer to the end of Trump’s term—McConnell gleefully and unashamedly shifted principles and argued that a new Justice should be seated right away, that is, by Trump rather than his successor; no commitment to let the next president choose this time. And of course, the advantage of a Republican Senate and president further solidified their advantage on the Court.
Politics has never been an arena of principles. Granted, political players often appeal to principles, such as freedom or rights, and sometimes try to make their utterances and actions appear principled. However, it is essential to understand that politics is fundamentally about advantage, not about principles, and that principles positively get in the way of politically advantageous action; indeed, principles are intended to prevent individuals, parties, and other interest groups from (ab)using and maximizing their advantage. The main feature or quality of principles is their universality: they should apply in all situations and equally to all participants, the powerful and weak, the majority and the minority, alike. They are among the “guardrails” of a just and democratic society, as people refer to them these days.
Another shameless example of Republican unprincipled behavior surrounded the Charlie Kirk incident. Kirk, himself an unprincipled and unashamed conservative operative and founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed in September 2025. The conservative outcry against the crime was immediate, and of course, all decent people condemn such violence. No one was allowed to say a negative word about Kirk, though—or even to repeat his own decidedly negative words—or to emphasize that the hostile, threatening rhetoric of Kirk or of Trump himself contributes to the American culture of anger and political violence.
More disturbingly, while Kirk was virtually canonized as an American martyr, and liberals and Democrats were roundly blamed for all the animosity and violence in American society, nary a reference was made to conservative/Republican plots and attempts against liberal/Democratic figures, such as the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in 2011, the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul in 2022 (which actually targeted her), the attempted assassination of Louisville mayoral candidate Craig Greenburg in 2022, the planned kidnapping and execution of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, or earlier incidents like the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995—not to mention the extrajudicial police killings of several Black Americans like George Floyd, Michael Brown, and Breonna Taylor or, lest we forget, the storming of the Capitol in January 2021 with full intent to hang Trump’s own vice president Mike Pence and to kill Pelosi. Teenager Kyle Rittenhouse was lauded as a conservative hero for crossing state lines to shoot three (two fatally) in August 2020. Need we add the armed and geared-up Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, etc.?
We could multiply examples at dismal length. Trump orders missile attacks on Venezuelan boats—and then lately the kidnapping and extradition of Venezuela’s president Maduro—on the putative principle of fighting drug trafficking while pardoning the convicted drug trafficker and former (conservative) president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández. Speaking of pardons, Trump pardoned virtually all of the January 6 insurrectionists and demands the release of convicted election interferer Tina Peters (even issuing a bogus “pardon” for her state charges in Colorado) while threatening Democrats with arrest and imprisonment for following the law. Republicans pound on Hunter Biden’s business relationship with Ukrainian company Burisma, while the Trump Family Inc. profits by openly doing business with America’s allies and enemies and accepting lavish gifts like a jet plane from Qatar. Still more astonishingly, Republicans continue to harp on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, while Trump and his regime conduct affairs of state on Twitter/X and unsecured Signal group chats.
Meanwhile, Trump hides behind the “principle” of removing “the worst of the worst” of illegal immigrants, while actually brutalizing and extraordinarily renditioning students, parents, workers, and other non-dangerous individuals, many of whom did not in fact enter the country illegally but crossed the border in search of asylum and are lawfully awaiting their immigration hearing (and have frequently been arrested while attending just those hearings).
For many, their only crime is speaking out (sometimes in a school newspaper) against the regime’s excesses and crimes. And on and on. Liberal donors like George Soros are excoriated, but the platoon of conservative donors is celebrated and feted or kept dark. “Freedom of speech” is flown like a flag, but only for conservative voices on social media and legacy media. Liberals and Democrats—or even Republicans, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene—who venture a contrary opinion are pilloried and met with death threats, and Trump blatantly calls for critics like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel to be fired and their networks to be punished.
Ironically or not, former Fox News personality Howard Kurtz (2025) recently recognized, if not praised, this “politics of shamelessness.” “Every politician operates with a certain degree of shamelessness. It’s practically in the job description,” he writes. He singles out Trump’s conspicuously unprincipled reversal on the TikTok ban because the president sees personal benefit in not only preserving the app but looking like its savior. Is such a blatant lack of principle and shame disgraceful? Possibly, but “grace” has left the building along with principle and shame. Compared to all the politicians who came before (but who knows what will come after?!), “Trump may have the biggest shameless gene of them all,” Kurtz opines, “and that’s part of why he’s successful.”
One of the many perverse angles on this sordid development is that it was conservatives like Robert Bork in his 1996 Slouching Towards Gomorrah who previously attributed the decline of American morality to the liberal rejection of shame; no longer were people embarrassed to get pregnant outside of wedlock, to receive an abortion, to practice infidelity, to be homosexual, and so forth. Exactly twenty years later, conservatives would line up enthusiastically, if not blindly, behind a twice-divorced, wife-cheating, avowed pussy-grabbing (and later convicted sex-offending, convicted sex-offensive-victim-defaming, and convicted financial defrauding) pathological liar and braggart who displays no shame (and certainly no contrition) for his multiple immoralities and illegalities, no principles behind his erratic and destructive decisions, and no shame for his utter bankruptcy of principles.
References:
Kruger, Justin and David Dunning. 1999. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 1121-34.
Kurtz, Howard. 2025. “The Politics of Shamelessness: A Survival Tactic from Trump to Party Loyalty.” https://www.foxnews.com/politics/politics-shamelessness-survival-tactic-from-trump-party-loyalty?msockid=3166cd51042a647d3260dd760517653e, accessed December 25, 2025.
Image Credit: “14June2025 OlympiaWA NoKings-TrumpIsCorrupt” by GardnerAtAGallop, licensed under CC BY 4.0 Wikimedia Commons
