How much of this happens today - in society and in politics:
to reduce (someone) to a lower position in one's own eyes or others' eyes : to make (someone) ashamed or embarrassed Humiliate Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
the feeling of being ashamed or losing respect for yourself HUMILIATION | definition in the Cambridge English DictionaryA book has come out looking at this in the field of society and politics: The Politics of Humiliation - Ute Frevert - Oxford University Press
Here's the author: The politics of humiliation | 10-Minute Talks | The British Academy - YouTube
It's been around a long time in the United States - since 1984:
No show better illustrates the elements of humiliation television than the highly popular series The Apprentice. The show won huge ratings by pitting sixteen aspiring businessmen and women in a battle to win a $250,000 job with real estate mogul Donald Trump, whose weekly task was to tell a contestant, “You’re fired.” ... what humiliation TV represents is the rise of a pop culture in which schadenfreude has been so artfully disguised that it gives the illusion of being without political content.
Since 2016;
I am convinced that we are witnessing the politics of humiliation. People who grew up with a powerful sense of white, masculine privilege (as well as others who sympathise with that image of power), people for whom that sense of superiority was always precarious and always needed protection, found in Donald Trump a figure for their own fantasy of the restoration of an era now gone.Since 2020:
About four years ago, without asking anybody, I changed my job description. It used to be “New York Times foreign affairs columnist.” Instead, I started calling myself the “New York Times humiliation and dignity columnist.” I even included it on my business card. It had become so obvious to me that so much of what I’d been doing since I became a journalist in 1978 was reporting or opining about people, leaders, refugees, terrorists and nation-states acting out on their feelings of humiliation and questing for dignity — the two most powerful human emotions. I raise this now because the success of Joe Biden’s campaign against Donald Trump may ride on his ability to speak to the sense of humiliation and quest for dignity of many Trump supporters, which Hillary Clinton failed to do...
Humiliation, in my view, is the most underestimated force in politics and international relations. The poverty of dignity explains so much more behavior than the poverty of money. People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you make people feel humiliated, they will respond with a ferocity unlike any other emotion, or just refuse to lift a finger for you. As Nelson Mandela once observed, “There is nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated.” By contrast, if you show people respect, if you affirm their dignity, it is amazing what they will let you say to them or ask of them. Sometimes it just takes listening to them, but deep listening — not just waiting for them to stop talking. Because listening is the ultimate sign of respect. What you say when you listen speaks more than any words.
I’ve seen firsthand the power of humiliation in foreign policy: Vladimir Putin’s macho act after Russia’s humiliation at losing the Cold War; Iraqi Sunnis who felt humiliated by a U.S. invasion force that pushed them out of Iraq’s army and government, stripping them of rank and status; Israeli Sephardic Jews who felt humiliated by Ashkenazi Jewish elites, something Bibi Netanyahu has long manipulated; Palestinians feeling humiliated at Israeli checkpoints; Muslim youth in Europe feeling humiliated by the Christian majority; and China questing to become the world’s dominant power, after what Chinese themselves call their “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers.
When George Floyd was being held down by three policemen, one with a knee on his neck, as he pleaded for his mother and onlookers filmed on their phones, he was not just being restrained — he was being humiliated. Resistance to the daily humiliations of racism has fueled the Black civil rights movement from its inception to Black Lives Matter.
In a much talked-about new book, “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel (disclosure: he is a close friend) says “the politics of humiliation” is also at the heart of Trump’s appeal. “Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties had no compelling answer,” Sandel notes. These grievances “are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.” Sandel explains, “Resentment borne of humiliation is the most potent political sentiment of all.”
Opinion | Who Can Win America’s Politics of Humiliation? - The New York Times
It's been around a long time in the UK - since before 2016:
Underlying these discourses was a sense that EU membership represented a form of humiliation for a once great country, infantilising the UK and its people. Leave campaigners such as Nigel Farage created direct parallels between the sense of indignity and powerlessness experienced by many of their target voters in their own lives and that allegedly wrought upon their country by the EU and the same elites who look down on them.
In the article Populism and the Affective Politics of Humiliation Narrative authors Homolar and Löfflmann look at the use of populist humiliation narratives and voter mobilization in the United Kingdom, France, and the USA. They find that populist appeals to victimhood are used to assign blame with elites in politics, businesses, and media for a sense of loss and marginalisation, for national decline from past imagined glories, and to foster political conflict.
Researchers point to populism’s appeal to victimhood and resentment
It's very much happening today in the UK:
“His conduct also involved an abuse or misuse of power in a way that undermines or humiliates.” Dominic Raab, U.K. deputy prime minister, quits after bullying probe
It's been happening for a long time in Russia:
Mr. Putin’s success as president of Russia has rested for some time on his ability to mete out daily humiliations to Russians and then act as if he feels their rage as they do, as if he alone knows where to direct it — toward the West, toward Ukraine, anywhere except toward the Kremlin... Mr. Putin likes to perform both sides of the humiliation drama: from the seething resentment of the put-upon Russian Everyman to cosplaying Peter the Great. This allows him to appeal to Russians’ deep-seated sense of humiliation, which the Kremlin itself inflicts on people, and then compensate for it. It’s a performance that taps into the cycle of humiliation and aggression that defines the experience of life in Russia, and now Ukraine is the stage...
In the “family,” ethnic Russians are known as “the elder brother,” but that doesn’t mean they are spared humiliation. Whether it’s the bureaucrats and cops who threaten and bribe citizens and businesses, the farce of participating in fixed elections or the cloying fear that you might be arrested if you dare to speak up against the Kremlin — or if some bureaucrat just wants your business — living in Mr. Putin’s Russia means enduring the daily humiliation of being governed by an extractive class that takes money and lives from its own people. In this system, even tycoons must live with the uncertainty that someone closer to Mr. Putin than them could take away all their wealth tomorrow. The culture of humiliation goes deep into society. Sexual harassment is routine. A 2017 law decriminalized some domestic abuse against children and women. Extreme hazing has been rife in the army...
In his exploration of humiliation, the contemporary English psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in the London Review of Books that, for the psychic survival of the humiliated, it’s necessary for them to “humiliate others, to make others experience what they have suffered” and “to transform the trauma of vulnerability into the triumph of omnipotent control.” The perpetrator enjoys his sadism; the victim, in order to deal with the humiliation, might learn to enjoy that too and become a masochist, before becoming sadistic to others. Mr. Putin’s manipulation of the cycle of humiliation and aggression is integral to his psychological grip on Russia. That manipulation can look like legislating to criminalize opposition to the war while also appealing for solidarity in the fight against the West. As the impact of economic sanctions rolls across Russia, Kremlin propaganda has called for Russians to show how tough they are: Haven’t they survived great trials in the past? These calls for toughness can resonate — people can learn to define themselves through surviving pain to the point of getting a certain satisfaction from it.
For Russia to have a chance to come to terms with itself, it will be necessary to confront this history and bring it into the public consciousness — via TV shows or public memorials and educational projects. But admitting one’s own role in this cycle of humiliation and aggression is stymied by the very culture of humiliation: The humiliated feel they have no agency, so why should they feel responsible?
Opinion | Putin Performs for Russia, and Ukraine Is the Stage - The New York Times
And the Soviet-born British journalist says pretty much the same here (from 13:35 - and in particular 18:35):
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