> The most successful political innovations - legislative bodies & courts - have both taken strong measures to make it difficult to shame people into cooperation

?!? Legislative bodies used to rely on shame (the opposite of honor) as a means of enforcing unwritten rules. It used to be possible to shame politicians into resigning when they'd crossed a line.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” -- Joe Welch cancels Joe McCarthy

Remember that Nixon resigned. He wasn't impeached out of office for his crimes, he was shamed into resigning when they came to light.

> provide effective ways to fight back against a shaming

Please list some court sanctioned ways to fight back against shaming and how these are not an infringement of free speech.

Nixon met with Congress members and was told that he would be impeached with certainty, so he resigned the next day. He was decidedly not resigning over shame.

Without the pardon from Ford, it’s possible he would be charged and indicted with a felony even. So yeah, there is a whole lot more to him resigning than shame

I'd also like to point out that by resigning Nixon was assured his pension

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/08/10/archives/nixon-to-get-600...

You've just listed 100% of the presidents who's resignations could plausibly be linked to shaming tactics. It is a very, very short list compared to the number of presidents who have had shame deployed against them as a political weapon.

The two main tools the parliaments use is regular, time based election cycles combined with very formal procedures making sure everyone gets a chance to speak. In the ones I'm more familiar with (Australian, British, probably American) they also have well developed traditions against name-calling and insistence on respectful language and behaviours like using proper titles (which can be a bit off-putting seeing how politicians act outside parliament). If a politician has a solid faction backing them they can get away with some pretty extreme stuff and just shrug off the criticism. Trump is a more interesting case study, but realistically anyone in modern politics has to wade through a tide of abuse to get anything done. It is all but impossible to stop a politician getting a message out and sticking by it if there are votes to be had.

The main tools the courts use are having professional and emotionally unattached advocates who are aligned with the people they represent (aka lawyers) and extremely developed rules of evidence that strip out opinion and personal standards in an explicit quest to work out the facts and make sure any punishment is consistent with the law.

Those are arguments about shaming _inside_ parliaments and courts, which are obviously controlled speech environments; that has limited effect _outside_ courts, with the exception of sub judice rules.

> well developed traditions against name-calling and insistence on respectful language and behaviours like using proper titles (which can be a bit off-putting seeing how politicians act outside parliament)

Indeed. You can call your opponent a terrorist criminal just fine as long as you step outside the building first.

For a given dispute the court is certainly more likely to find a just result .. if you can afford to litigate. Or, in the case of criminal law, if the prosecutors will prosecute. If they won't, you can only resort to "the court of public opinion", i.e. shaming.

McCarthy was censured by the Senate.

I assume that argument excludes the legal/political/cultural institutions of the non-Western world? Because in particular in East Asia shame has a very long and central role, and a fairly successful one, in maintaining group cohesion.

We're talking about mechanisms here that have proven to stabilize societies for literally thousands of years, enumerating things doesn't quite have that history yet.

yeah I broadly agree. Shame is a good small group policing mechanism, in my imagination I see a homogenous kinship group in a hostile environment. Shame works there, but not necessarily for anything larger scale.