There was a time when a politician caught in wrongdoing could expect the machinery of public life to grind them down — party, press, and voter moving in rough concert toward consequence. That machinery has not simply rusted; it has been disassembled by polarization, replaced by parallel information worlds in which the same act of misconduct reads as damning to one half of the electorate and as persecution to the other. What we are witnessing is not merely a rise in shamelessness, but a structural unraveling of the shared civic space that once made accountability possible.