The War on Empathy

Most people have forgotten this, but the word “bully” was once commonly used much the way “awesome” is used today: to assert the excellence of something, or to congratulate someone. A hundred years ago, the phrase “Bully for you!” had not a drop of irony in it.

So in 1909, when Teddy Roosevelt crowed that he had “a bully pulpit”, he meant that the sitting U.S. President has an amazing megaphone from which to guide, like a preacher might, the moral character of the nation. (Roosevelt apparently had a lot of opinions about the moral character of the nation.)

Now here we are in the twenty-first century, when a “bully” means someone “who is habitually cruel, insulting, or threatening to others who are weaker, smaller, or in some way vulnerable”. Most of the time, we think of bullies as being children picking on other children.

But there are adult bullies too. And recently, America voted again to hand the power of the Presidency — and the world’s biggest megaphone — to a man who has made no secret of the fact that he is a bully, who in fact revels openly in it. Who in his first campaign mocked a disabled reporter, who bragged how he could “do anything” to women, even “grab ’em by the pussy.”

Everyone needs to stop tying themselves in knots trying to figure out some grand plan behind Trump’s ridiculous tariffs.

There is no cleverness here, no evil genius; he just sees an opportunity to browbeat all of America’s erstwhile allies and make them scramble to appease him — what fun to watch world leaders grovel! — and then “make deals” to grow his personal fortune, like a playground bully stealing other kids’ lunch money. That’s all the Presidency is to him: power to be used to flatter his own ego and make himself even richer. In fact, he thinks anyone who has that kind of power and doesn’t use it to rub everyone else’s faces in the dirt is despicable and weak.

The only people Trump admires or respects even a little are other extremely powerful bullies who run the same playbook: billionaire oligarchs like Elon Musk, billionaire dictators like Vladimir Putin.

We got off easy, the first time: no one was prepared for Trump to win, least of all Trump himself, and there was enough resilience in the apparatus of government — largely in the form of dedicated, unappreciated career civil servants — to temper most of his worst impulses.

This time, he was ready. He’s swept away almost everyone with a moral compass, surrounding himself with toadies and other bullies. (Some of those other bullies think they are using him, because that’s the way bullies see all relationships. It doesn’t often work out that way, as the people who put Hitler in office, or Putin, soon found out.)

Have you noticed that most of the people around Trump are other billionaires? Social scientists studying wealth and empathy have determined that the more money someone has, the less likely they are to experience empathy and compassion. Take Elon Musk — the world’s richest man literally stated that “the empathy response” is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He specifically wants to root empathy out of public society.

So it’s no coincidence that every single action Trump and Musk are taking is specifically anti-empathy. Imprisoning foreigners, dismantling USAID, defunding cancer research, gutting Medicaid, all of it. We’re being told that we shouldn’t care about foreigners, immigrants, or trans people; shouldn’t care about Black and brown people, or women; shouldn’t care about people who are disabled, sick, hungry, or old.

In fact, don’t have empathy for anyone! … oh, except rich white billionaire men whose stock prices are falling — after all, they are the pinnacle of society, and deserve to be treated as such! But everyone else deserves only cruelty and scorn.

The so-called “woke mind-virus”? It’s just empathy. “Woke culture” is just broad societal disapproval of punching down.

And the dismantling of “woke culture”? That’s giving bullies everywhere permission to do whatever they like. That’s what Trump has done with America’s biggest megaphone; that’s the moral character that he is steering the nation toward.

“Your body, my choice,” gloat men on the internet, while ICE and CBP agents use their petty powers to torture innocent people who just happened to be born somewhere else.

What do you do in the face of so much evil?

Here’s what I do: I am doubling down on kindness. I am deliberately, thoughtfully going out of my way — in my everyday, not-online life — to think of ways to be generous and extra-helpful to the people around me. Just a lot of little things, like regularly sharing food I’ve cooked, or offering to run an errand for someone who’s sick and lives alone.^[1] Last week I formalized some of those relationships into a small mutual aid pod; now I am working on expanding it.

I’m really scared about our own financial future right now, but — since I can’t be there in person — I’m still sending small donations to groups helping people more vulnerable than we are.

If I still lived in the United States, I would have been one of the millions of people at Hands Off! rallies this past Saturday, offering people water and sunscreen and camaraderie.

And if I saw anyone bullying someone else, I would step in and offer pointed kindness to their target. I would tell an immigrant that I was glad they were here; I would ask a trans person for their preferred pronouns and use them. I would be as public about all of this as I could, because every time you do that where other people can see, you push the culture just a little bit back towards decency.

The bullies are a tiny minority, and always will be. Don’t let them forget it.

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