Billionaires Want You to Blame Yourself. We Win When We Stop.

For most of my life, I thought my hardest moments—the bills I couldn’t pay, the groceries I had to put back at the checkout line, the dental emergency that spiraled into medical debt and eventually cost me my home—were personal failures. I carried those experiences as quiet shame, proof that I had somehow fallen short.

But what I now understand, through my own life, advocacy, and thousands of conversations in town halls and community events across the country, is that what we label as “individual failure” is so often a public policy failure: institutions, systems, and policies that allow the rich to keep getting richer while the rest of us fall further behind. The result is a vicious cycle in which shame for falling behind is trained inward, causing people to blame themselves for the hardships they face. And bad policy thrives on the silence that shame fosters.

Shame Is the Billionaire Class’s Most Reliable Shield

As the executive director of Fair Share America, I’ve spent the last year traveling across the country on the Stop the Billionaire Giveaway bus tour to hear from Americans directly about how the Trump administration’s reconciliation bill is harming their families through lost health coverage, rising premiums, food insecurity, and higher household costs. These events were the first public outlet many of these people had to speak out against the billionaire-first agenda in Washington.

From churches to community centers, rural front porches to packed town halls, I attended over 55 community events in 17 states to engage with people impacted by the relentless assault on what remains of our social programs. Over and over again, I heard my own experience reflected back as participants described what losing their health care or food assistance would mean for them, their children, and their entire communities. I could sense pain and shame blooming in their stories as they shared them in a room full of strangers.

Someone’s voice shakes as they talk about choosing between rent and medicine. A parent admits they skip meals so their kids can eat. A senior describes the quiet terror of watching their grocery bill rise faster than their Social Security check. And almost always, they preface their story with an apology: “I should have done better. I wish this wasn’t happening to me.”

That apology is the most devastating lie our political culture has ever sold.

Shame is a powerful tool of social control. It tells people their suffering is private, that their struggle reflects bad choices instead of public policy failures. Shame isolates and silences us. It keeps us from demanding better. The corporations and the billionaire class at the top of that system thrive off of—in fact, depend on—our fear, our shame, and our isolation.

Breaking the Neoliberal Script—and Rewriting It Ourselves

For decades, neoliberalism has heavily shaped our culture and our economy. This culture glorifies “free” markets (with fewer rules and guardrails for big companies), treats public support as inherently suspect, and teaches us to see financial struggle as personal failure rather than structural design. It falsely promises security through self-sufficiency but, in reality, delivers widespread uncertainty, loneliness, and shame.

The Stop the Billionaire Giveaway town halls explicitly disrupted this toxic neoliberal script—that suffering is shameful, that asking for help is weakness, that economic hardship reflects personal failure. There is power in putting a fine point on exactly who is profiting from their suffering. While a data center’s tax burden is subsidized, a single mom turns off her heat for fear of an unaffordable utility bill. While a local food pantry watches its shelves go bare, the White House is breaking ground on a ballroom.

Again and again, I watched people experience an almost physical release when they realized: This isn’t just happening to me. Once one person breaks the silence, more follow. This collective recognition is where real power begins—where we can connect the dots between our personal suffering and the policy decisions that have not only enabled but encouraged it.

They begin to reframe their story from “Why did I mess up?” to “Why does the system keep setting us up to fail?” They start to see that the barriers they’ve faced—not lack of will, but lack of good policy, safety nets, and collective investment in dignity—are shared. My team has worked hard to make sure these communities leave events knowing explicitly who they’re up against—that their private pain is evidence of structural failure.

I know this because I’ve experienced that release and recognition myself. At one town hall, I chose to share my deepest shame: how an $886 dental bill led to a medical debt doom loop and ultimately the foreclosure of my home. After sharing my story, I realized that it wasn’t a shortfall in my work to be this vulnerable, but rather a superpower. I’d always been an organizer, but now I could finally channel the energy I once spent blaming myself directly toward the people and systems that caused my economic suffering.

In this sense, what we’re doing in town halls and community rooms is not just organizing—it’s building a new culture, a new moral order, that rejects shame and isolation and instead builds solidarity. That means reimagining what it means to be supported. What it means to belong. What it means to be worthy. And then building institutions, workplaces, communities, and governments that embody those values.

What Better Policymaking Looks Like When We Break Silence and Shame

At a forum Fair Share America hosted in October, Roosevelt Institute President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins said, “If we are building a new kind of world, then policy has to be deeply informed by—motivated by—the lived experiences of people.”

If we want better policymaking, we need more policymakers and more advocates who are willing to say, “This happened to me” or “Listen to this person’s experience.” We must refuse to hide the parts of our own stories that contradict the myth of endless self-sufficiency. Because every time someone with power breaks that silence, they widen the doorway for everyone else. Just as importantly, we need policy imagined and written by the people who actually live it. Lived experience is expertise, and it’s time we started treating it that way.

We must also understand that we don’t just need better programs—we need a better story about why people are entitled to those programs in the first place. That story is not about dependency, scarcity, or who “earned” help. It’s about decency, autonomy, and living a life that is enjoyable, not one to be suffered through.

When people leave these town halls, they don’t walk out as victims. They walk out as authors who understand their story differently. They see how their struggle connects to others. They recognize that change is not something done to them or for them but something that we are capable of shaping.

That mental shift is cultural. It is political. And, with the right tools and the right folks in leadership, it’s scalable. We are still early in this work. When it comes to the 2025 reconciliation bill, we are just beginning the process of transforming private shame into public demand, turning diagnosis into design, and imagining policies that grow out of lived reality instead of economic theory detached from human life.

But I am convinced of this much: The future of effective policymaking will not be built in boardrooms in Washington, DC. It will be built in circles of chairs, in church basements, in public spaces where communities gather with a clear understanding of their problems and what it will take to fix them. It will be built by people who no longer believe their suffering is a personal flaw and who now know, together, that they have the power to change the systems that caused it and create something better, something more equitable, something more just.