About 30 years ago, a defense attorney asked Paul O’Brien to stipulate to the expertise of a proposed witness — a community college professor whose main qualification, O’Brien recalls, was an unpublished paper positing low self-esteem as the principal cause of criminal behavior. O’Brien, then a prosecutor, declined. He didn’t share his most compelling reason: “The premise of the proposed expert’s work simply didn’t pass my smell-test.”
That instinct was reinforced, he writes in a new essay for American Thinker, by one of “the vilest utterances” he ever heard in a courtroom. A juvenile who had confessed to shooting and killing a man explained his rationale in chilling terms: “He looked at me. He doesn’t get to look at me.”
O’Brien, a retired California lawyer who spent 25 years in the justice system, is now making a broader argument — one that connects that young killer’s mindset to the contemporary political left. In “Shaming the Shameless: A Fool’s Errand,” he contends that public shaming was never about rehabilitation, and that both career criminals and today’s radicals share a trait: they are not vulnerable to shame.
Shame, in theory and practice
O’Brien acknowledges that shame can be a useful tool — but only, he writes, “among people whose value systems are aligned.” In a close-knit community, shame can police behavior effectively. But it requires projecting the community’s values onto the alleged wrongdoer. “In my estimation,” he writes, “that is a bridge too far.”
His courtroom experience, he says, taught him that the accused rarely showed a “contrite heart” — that quality was, in his words, the least evident of any human state of mind among the “countless miscreants” he encountered. Instead, those found culpable were “either upset with a system that viewed their behavior as wrong, or insistent that in their particular circumstances their conduct was not merely defensible, but constituted the proper administration of the right kind of justice.” They would “tsk-tsk” at investigators, scowl at him, and file pro se appellate briefs accusing judges and authorities of conspiratorial corruption — hardly the profile of people moved by social disapproval.
O’Brien notes that a study he found early in his career refuted the low-self-esteem theory, finding instead that “the incarcerated tended to have an exaggerated sense of self-esteem.” The defense bar, he says, was horrified — and he hasn’t seen the findings mentioned in 20 years.
From the courtroom to the culture war
The essay then pivots from criminal justice to politics. O’Brien argues that policies like eradicating cash bail, defunding the police, abolishing ICE, forswearing borders, decriminalizing theft, and dismantling prisons are “ideas given birth by the same sort of personality as the reprobates described above.”
“Call them radicals. Call them sociopaths. Call them shameless,” he writes. “By any name, when working in cooperation, they are also nihilists.”
The Democratic Socialists of America, he argues, are “bolder in their nihilism than their forebears” — an evolutionary stage any “political Darwinist” would have predicted.
O’Brien draws a distinction between classical liberals — citing Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill — and modern figures like George McGovern and Barack Obama, whom he says were never true liberals in that tradition. The American left, he writes, has long been composed of “patient incrementalists whose design was always something beyond higher marginal tax rates and lavish government spending.”
Nihilism as a means, not an end
Why would anyone adopt policies “anathema to American tradition”? O’Brien’s answer: nihilism is a useful wingman for anarchism, and anarchy is a means to a further end.
“While it isn’t essential to anarchism, nihilism is a useful wingman for its kissing cousin,” he writes. “First, take down the walls — the traditions, morals, customs and practices — of civil society. After that, collapsing the political structure itself is a fait accompli.” He casts nihilism as a “post-Apocalyptic geologic map” and anarchism as a chaotic political overlay sitting atop the decay — reachable only where the geology is accommodating.
But is anarchy the goal? “No, communism is,” O’Brien asserts. “Anarchy creates the void that must be filled, for civilization, like nature, abhors a vacuum.”
A generational amnesia about communism
O’Brien, who was an undergraduate in the late 1970s, recalls the trope that “communism has never been properly implemented.” Hearing it resurrected 50 years later, he writes, is “appalling,” and he accuses today’s revisionists of claiming victories communism never won. He observes that the faces of today’s politicians, professors, and journalists “rarely bear a line, the hair is invariably dark, and their gait is easy” — attributes he finds telling.
“They are to be forgiven their youth,” he writes, “but not their concerted effort to remain ignorant of the ravages of communism.”
The long march hits a wall
O’Brien argues that statists have discovered, as Mainers say, “You can’t get there from here” — that within a functioning constitutional republic, there is no path to communism. “It’s not that it’s been hidden or overgrown with capitalist paraphernalia,” he writes. “It’s that there is none: no headwaters for that stream, no trailhead for that hike, no junction for that train.” The tactics, therefore, have changed: “They see their only way to win is to blow things up.”
For decades, the left pursued a “long march through the institutions,” capturing faculty lounges, newsrooms, and boardrooms. But, O’Brien argues, they hit an invisible force with real stopping power: the institutions include not just government, academia, and media, but the English language itself, and the religion, literature, folklore, customs, and traditions passed down through generations. “And within all that,” he writes, “they discovered, resides a love for freedom.”
Whether the issue is gender theory, territorial integrity, the separation of powers, DEI, federalism, or the abolition of crime, O’Brien concludes, “ultimately, the ‘institution’ we have greatest need to protect is us.” He urges prayer as essential to that protection, invoking Christian scripture and the “full armor of God” — truth, righteousness, readiness, faith, hope, and the word of God.
The essay is, at bottom, a warning: that the shameless cannot be shamed, that the radical project is cynical and deliberate, and that the defense of American institutions begins with the individuals who constitute them. Whether readers share O’Brien’s conclusions, his career-spanning observation about the limits of shame offers a provocative lens on a familiar political divide.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/08/shaming-the-shameless-a-fool-s-errand/