How Ostracizing Backfires

I am seeing a certain prescription circulating online that the only way forward is to shun, ostracize, or permanently exile MAGA voters from the moral community. I understand the impulse completely. But before accepting it as a strategy, I think it is worth asking what the thinkers who study polarization, authoritarianism, and social fracture actually say about whether ostracization works.

Looking at Naomi Klein, Heather Cox Richardson, and Isabel Wilkerson, a clear theory of change emerges. All three I think would warn that mass shunning does not weaken authoritarian movements and that in fact, it may actually strengthen them.

Naomi Klein: Abandonment Fuels Authoritarianism

In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein suggests that authoritarian movements thrive not just on fear, but on abandonment and ostracization. Klein analyzes how right-wing figures have manufactured a conspiracy-driven reality (surrounding vaccines, lockdowns, and democratic institutions) to instill fear and polarize society for authoritarian aims. She shows how many people that are pulled into MAGA-adjacent spaces and conspiracy theories are economically stressed and distrustful of institutions, and how – in a search for explanations for their pain – they easily fall prey to the lies fed to them. I think Klein would argue that when these people are written off wholesale as irredeemable, it confirms the core story they’ve been told: that elites despise them. From Klein’s framework, mass shunning would accelerate polarization by deepening the emotional divide between “elites” and everyone else.

Heather Cox Richardson: Saving Democracy Calls For Coalitions

Heather Cox Richardson approaches this question historically. In her work she documents how, during periods of economic instability and democratic stress, elites have repeatedly encouraged dividing the public into the “deserving” and the “deplorables” or the “real Americans” and the “threats.” Richardson’s analysis does not show that democratic repair has happened by writing off large segments of the population. Her work shows the opposite - that democracy survives when we create broad coalitions, often including people who once supported authoritarian leaders and later recognized they had been manipulated. To manifest these coalitions will require the work of educating and bringing people in.

Isabel Wilkerson: Ostracization Reinforces Caste

Isabel Wilkerson makes the structural danger clearest. In Caste, she writes, “Caste is a disease, and none of us is immune.” Her argument is that hierarchies survive by convincing people that belonging is conditional, and only when the dominant class approaches the system with radical awareness and radical empathy will the system change. From Wilkerson’s framework, mass shunning would be counterproductive to this goal because it does not allow the dominant class to see a way towards radical empathy. Instead, it reinforces caste boundaries, deepens grievance, and allows the hierarchy to survive in a more malignant form. This ultimately harms the most vulnerable communities first.

Where They Converge

These thinkers would converge on a shared conclusion: ostracization does not dismantle authoritarian movements and instead might feed the conditions they rely on. While firm boundaries against harm and violence are essential and in individual cases may produce better outcomes by forcing behavior change, mass moral exile and communications encouraging it will do more damage – it will harden identity, entrench hierarchy, and redirect anger away from the structures actually responsible for insecurity.

We’ve Already Tried This

There’s another reason I hesitated when I saw increasing commentary encouraging ostracization.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton referred to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Many people felt the comment was accurate. Some still do. But the political effect is not in dispute: it became a rallying cry. It was weaponized to confirm the idea that cultural elites despised ordinary people. It hardened identity lines and deepened grievance.

Since then, versions of this strategy have been repeated again and again: moral condemnation, social shunning, and calls to sever ties. And yet here we are more polarized, not less.

Half the country voted for Trump. Millions more sat out elections entirely. If half the country has been pulled into authoritarian politics, and we respond by declaring them permanently unreachable, I am not sure what the endgame is. History — both from the 1930s and as recently as 2016 — suggests we’ve tried mass shunning before, and it is the thing that helped get us here.

If we want a different outcome, we may need to choose a different way — one that holds firm boundaries, tells the truth clearly, and refuses to abandon the very people authoritarian movements are built to capture.

That’s the work I want to keep exploring here.