Shame has always been used to establish and maintain social structures and norms.

Is there some sudden rise of it? All my life I've been told by politicians and media corporations and others that I should be ashamed of various things that I think and do and am, as a poorly veiled effort to gain power by controlling people. And before my generation it had been going on a long time, with women wanting independence, black people wanting equal rights, men not wishing to be drafted to wars, gay rights, etc. I think shame and shaming has been a constant, and doesn't arise come from politics or media but human nature.

And I think most upheavals of the status quo have had to overcome this shame barrier. Shaming is probably a very effective psychological tool to conserve social order, but if it's abused or if people want change enough, eventually the lid will pop, and then when there is some critical mass moving away they actually bond together and take pride in being shameless and offending the people trying to shame them, and even might go to exaggerated lengths to do these "shameful" things and rile people up.

So I don't think it is that people or the politicians they vote for just decided they would use it as a strategy. I think it's actually that shame (which they see as coming from an "outgroup") is no longer a viable strategy.

For shame to work we need the whole society to agree that certain behaviors are shameful, otherwise the shamed person can simply change their social circle. In homogeneous societies, like Japan, this still works, at least for Japanese people. But in diverse societies, like most western democracies, you can always find a social circle that will accept you.

Bang on the money. This trend is really just a recognition that compassion, empathy, shame, etc. have been weaponized in service of sociopathic attempts to control people and society.

Too often shaming or labelling viewpoints you disagree with as "hateful" without further elaboration is really just a thin veneer over the absence of any actual position. Intellectual laziness masked with the paper tiger of loaded words and language.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...