Growing up, my house backed up to a park with a teeter-totter, the kind that was little more than a steel pipe with two wooden boards as seats. Yeah, I’m that old.
When I was little, the up and down was hours of fun. But bouncing from sky to dirt in a bipolar fashion loses its charms with endless repetition. As we grew older, my friends and I would try to balance instead, making the bar hover horizontally off the ground through a mix of physics and what seemed like magic.
That, folks, is my metaphor for life, America and this particular column. America needs balance, no matter how difficult it is to achieve, no matter if we topple a few times trying. And no, I don’t mean finding a moderate political middle ground — there’s no middle ground with hate.
We need to be both empathetic toward our fellow Americans while at the same time having clarity about the seriousness of our political moment — what is possible and what is not, what is practical and what being a decent human requires of us.
Empathy and clarity. Not one or the other, but both, in equal measure.
Let me explain why I am making this obvious point.
There is a new attack underway by the far right that some of you may yet be unaware of. Those who seemingly disdain values I hold dear — solidarity, compassion, freedom — have launched a war on empathy.
Yes, empathy, the ability to share and understand the feelings of another — the gateway drug to emotions including mercy, and values including tolerance and justice. Some on the right have gone so far as to declare empathy a sin.
That may sound like a bad Christmas joke, but it’s true. This tantrum against our ability, maybe even obligation, to recognize others’ experiences is a strange and sad offshoot of the successful assault on “woke,” which has always been little more than belligerence toward equality.
This denigration of empathy is steadily if stealthily gaining a following on the so-called Christian right. More disturbingly, it can be seen in federal policy, which increasingly doesn’t just allow cruelty, but favors it. To wit: Stephen Miller.
MAGA champion Elon Musk put this view most succinctly when he labeled empathy as dangerous to America, and “Western” civilization as a whole.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Musk said earlier this year on the Joe Rogan podcast. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through.”
The premise here isn’t that all empathy is wrong, only empathy for those deemed unworthy. I’ll let you make your own list of who Musk and other followers of this mean little philosophy consider undeserving.
There’s an ugly logic to this position, though — which is what makes it dangerous. Empathy tells us to help everyone all the time, to open our hearts, our borders and maybe even our federal coffers.
Clarity tells us it’s simply not possible to help everyone, and trying to do so will topple the whole shebang. Musk is right that choices about who to help and how to help are necessary.
But his pitting of empathy in direct opposition to that clarity about our limitations is self-serving and, let’s be real, the kind of man-child narcissism currently being celebrated as strength. But we are not required to shrink into selfishness and judgment when faced with need. There is actually a Good Book that discusses this. And as individuals and a country, we have always made hard choices, sometimes fair ones, often not.
Regardless, this current attempt by the anti-empathy crowd to create a separation of humanity into valuable vs. exploitative is a guiding star for President Trump’s policies.
But here’s where it gets even more complicated, because we all have identities beyond country.
That’s diversity, the melting pot, the freedom we hold dear to be whatever we are. That freedom is the cornerstone of American society — but also the pluralism that was exploited in the recent cultural war over diversity, equity and inclusion. Pluralism lost that one, and now the fight for rights of all these different groups has somehow been successfully labeled as unjust.
Now, with the economy still giving most Americans the jitters, the anti-empathy crowd is gearing up to take that win a step further by making it seem obvious, just simply practicality and clarity, that we can either have empathy or protect ourselves and our loved ones.
Eighty percent of Americans agree with the statement that “empathy is a moral value that is the foundation of a healthy society,” according to one recent and well-respected survey from the Public Religion Research Institute.
But 37% of Christian nationalism adherents agreed that empathy “is a dangerous emotion that undermines our ability to set up a society that is guided by God’s truth.”
Christian nationalism is an isolationist, divisive ideology increasingly pushed by Trump that prioritizes not just a particular religion, but also white people and men. About 30% of Americans consider themselves adherents to its ideas, or are sympathetic to them, according to a different survey by PRRI. That jumps to more than 50% among Republicans.
It is from within this powerful segment of little authoritarians that the war on empathy was sparked. Behind Trump’s personal ambitions are the desires of this group to make America repressed again. That push toward religious authoritarianism requires callousness to achieve a shrinkage of free society, and demands that we leave “them” to their fate, out of trepidation that if we do not, we will share it.
For this reason, empathy is the greatest form of resistance, because it’s much harder to abandon someone if you can imagine yourself in their pain. This is especially true in the final stages of authoritarian consolidation of power, when the people capitulate in the hope that it will keep them safe.
We know America has always been an experiment, with the battle between empathy and clarity ongoing at its core. The Civil War, civil rights, the suffrage movement, LGBTQ+ rights: Each was a test not only of our empathy but our commitment to democracy, in its truest form, regardless of what we as individuals felt was at risk for ourselves.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. put it simply in 1961, another era when it seemed America would split into pieces: “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
We shouldn’t let this administration make any of us believe we must choose between empathy and clarity. It is possible, though not easy, to balance ourselves in our commonalities. We can lead with empathy, and collectively decide with clarity what is attainable, what is necessary and how best to pursue our better selves.
It was never magic that kept the teeter-totter of my youth dangling in midair. It was work, and intention and hope that the seemingly impossible was really just improbable but achievable.
The post Is empathy saving America — or tearing it apart? appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
