Empathy vs. Respect
My several-month late (sort-of) analysis of Ezra Klein and political division.
“They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly… They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Ezra Klein dedicated his perch at the New York Times to demonstrating his commitment to open discourse and open-mindedness. He first published a column about how Charlie was “practicing politics the right way” without including a single quote from him, followed by inviting Ben Shapiro to chat about the need for unity, and next by debating Ta-Nehisi Coates about why Democrats to be practical to regain power and how those practicalities are going to come at the expense of women and marginalized people—like suggesting that Democrats start embracing anti-choice candidates in places like Kansas (where a recent anti-abortion referendum was soundly defeated). It wasn’t difficult to see how the right was martyring Charlie Kirk and weaponizing his death to accelerate their plans to bring about a surveillance state, even at the juncture in which this content was attempting to provide some aisle-healing balm. The cheesy meliorism that Klein proposes doesn’t represent any meaningful deviation from the thoroughly debunked strategy of running concession Dems. If anything, it’s a Pavlovian surrender that’s conciliatory to conventional assumptions about American politics, if not the right-wing demand for total capitulation. It prompted progressives and even rank-and-file libs to ask: “What do we win if we’re surrendering what we’re fighting to achieve?”
Now, I don’t care to delve into the granular details of Ezra Klein’s electoral prescriptions for Democrats, because they have been sufficiently dragged, and this kind of horserace prognosticating makes for interminably boring commentary. But I am interested in this broader development because Klein’s response highlights the difference between empathy and respect, and how the two are often conflated. I have empathy for Republicans in the sense that I hope they live long and happy lives filled with purpose and self-actualization and dignity and the time to learn from their mistakes, and I will advocate for them to earn a living wage and have access to healthcare and education and to live in safe communities, and I want them to feel loved by their partners and friends and families; and I also think many of them are sour dorks who have been duped into supporting a blowzy and dimwitted autocrat because they embrace an overbearingly predative and socially abject style of Freedom. When the Big Beautiful Bill passed, one of the stipulations was that Medicare cuts would not trigger until after the upcoming midterms (that the GOP is at risk of losing), which should be enough to indicate that no one is more contemptuous of Republican voters than Republican politicians. In a strange sense, calling one of these MAGA doughnuts a smoothbrained hog to their face is affording them more respect than someone like Ted Cruz ever would.
Ezra Klein and I share many of the same concerns about the health of American democracy: The viral nature of stochastic violence, the coarsening of discourse via dehumanizing rhetoric, toxic echo chambers manufacturing alternate realities, and a growing number of Americans who are manifesting a civil war. A tragedy like Charlie Kirk’s death functions as a litmus test of who is pro-humanity and who uses politics as permission to act like a petty and vindictive freak. Many of us did not pass the vibe check.
In principle, I’m not opposed to the idea of Ezra Klein inviting someone like Ben Shapiro for a dialogue about turning down the political temperature. But any conversation regarding political violence that doesn’t acknowledge how the right-wing media machine has monetized hatred and incitement and division is one that refuses to confront what decent society is up against. The BBC’s Andrew Neil, a British Tory, has shown that it is entirely possible to maintain civil decorum and a calm demeanor while calling out these hatemongers for spewing napalm onto the discourse.
In diluting and negotiating their principles in the name of strategy, West Wing libs like Ezra Klein have triangulated themselves into a form of moral fecklessness that’s bereft of any dignity. When it comes to the debate over the causes of political polarization, the snuck premise here is that the left got a little too PC, so the right had no choice but to embrace a lavishly and howlingly fascist power grab. Now, I have no aversion to calling out the left’s ideological excesses, unearned moral superiority, and cringey faux revolutionary posturing, but it’s also worth reiterating that this morally absolutist idpol is generally adopted by the more corporate-friendly faction of the left as radical chic to appear more progressive than they really are. It is also pretty rich to see the party of personal responsibility completely abdicate any accountability or introspection for their role in how we’ve arrived at this moment of full-spectrum authoritarianism.
There is a point where grace becomes enabling. For the MAGA voters who have grown disillusioned with Donald Trump and have had a subsequent coming-to-Jesus moment, extending forgiveness to them is a wonderful virtue and necessary to closing this divide. But forgiveness absent of contrition, reconciliation, and a willingness to make amends ceases to be forgiveness—it is abetting shitty behavior. But, in many cases, they’re not even seeking forgiveness; they feel entitled to a moral pass.
When someone like Ezra Klein praises Charlie Kirk’s commitment to effective persuasion and chums it up with Ben Shapiro, I have to take some exception with the sacralization of debate in American culture. I’m all for disruptive or opposing viewpoints being contested in public. And it would be beneficial for our national civic life if people got out of their echo chambers, challenged themselves with conflicting ideas, familiarized themselves with different perspectives, and learned how to persuade others and disagree respectfully. But ragebaiters like Shapiro and Kirk have made a spectacle of owning the libs and provided their followers justification for entrenching themselves in their rancid priors. They do not promote mutual respect or open-mindedness or a thoughtful exchange of ideas; rather, they leverage gotchas and cheap sophistry for clicks while profiting from vile and divisive rhetoric. There’s a reason why these guys debate college freshmen and not college professors.
In the sinecure-intensive world of MAGA influencers, where even the most unctuous and otherwise unemployable goobers can garner clout, what passes for principles is delivering ornate flattery and absolute fidelity to Trump’s vinegary whims. With stringently punitive politics, high motors, and deeply disagreeable personalities, these right-wing pundits have made such effective strides in being blatantly horrible that accurately describing their behavior sounds like hyperbole.
The framing of MAGA as a normal conservative movement is also a way for Republicans to dismiss any criticism as liberal intolerance, a form of Trump Derangement Syndrome incapable of engaging with dissent. I despise MAGA not because it is conservative, but because it is a fascistic death cult full of intellectual cucks and desperately wack weirdos, cynical and credulous in equal measure, expressing their belief that the solution to every social and political problem is more assertive bossing. It is a movement that is every bit as stupid and venal as it appears to be, a constant violation of supposed conservative principles with no actual purpose to it, no broader program behind it, nothing but the blind certitude that all the cruelties that run downstream from Trump’s omnidirectional spite are wholly justified.
The way that a person could succumb to a movement like this, in a moment like this, has less to do with anything they believe in than it does with what they are willing to give up in servile striving, in dignity, in self-annihilating simping to a prissy golf blob whose only identifiable passion is about taking and having. There aren’t really any central tenets to Trumpism, because it is an absence of ethos, at least beyond the belief that it is the absolute and natural right of a vampiric oligarchy to prey upon everyone and everything else. It constructs a perverse permission structure of its own, and the crabbed fantasy of Trumpism for those in service of it is that they will get a taste of the same kind of unaccountability and impunity that Trump himself has so delighted in flaunting. It is, in every degrading sense, a sort of American Dream.
All of Trump’s underwrought bombast and frantic bullying is doing real and unjust damage to actual people’s lives and our democracy. Between Stephen Miller’s superheated Cobra Commander rhetoric of “plenary authority” to Steve Bannon’s assurance that “people just ought to get accommodated” with Trump running for a third term in 2028, every day in the Trumpenreich is a crystalline expression of a specific vengeance. A strident and signifying fascism streaks across Hitler-worshipping group chats to masked thugs terrorizing American cities. The most wretched monsters within Trump’s fanbase will fume over their tax dollars being used to feed children in need, but won’t bat an eye at billions of those same dollars bankrolling a genocide, buying private jets for Kristi Noem, bailing out Argentina, helping ICE teargas its own citizens, or building a fucking ballroom for the White House. It seems pointless to point out their selective outrage and hypocrisy these days, especially because the reality of it is so plain and shabby.
This brazen shamelessness emanates from Trump himself. His blank and insatiable appetite for consuming content, mostly the type that involves janky AI videos of him declaring “Chipocalypse Now” and air-bombing feces onto protestors, is now a substitute for governance. The state has taken up a grim and shameful kind of content creation as public policy, and it has become very difficult to ignore the reality that everything else in American life is atrophying due to the attention and resources directed to manufacturing this content for Trump’s amusement. Since the animating vector of MAGA politics is owning the libs, for Trump supporters to come to terms with how this promised American greatness has amounted to merciless wreckage, it wouldn’t just be an acceptance of defeat but a form of ego death.
So what does Finding Common Ground look like in this context?
One side believes in democracy, the other cheers on as a wannabe dictator declares war on American cities.
One side supports a government attuned to the needs of its citizens, the other is permissive of transparent corruption and repeated violations of the Constitution.
One side supports multiculturalism and egalitarianism, the other dreams of folding themselves within the authority structure of a white Christian ethnostate that privileges their existence.
In articulating and defending my principles, part of my commitment to empathy is the recognition that certain topics aren’t worth debating, like whether women and minorities should have political and social equality or whether Palestinians deserve to live. Once you’re willing to put civil liberties up for discussion, you have given the right what they want, which is to pit people’s humanity against each other. While it’s clear that the culture war is a diversion from the class war, the right is heavily invested in this fight. When they ask, “What is a woman,” they are trying to distract us from the fact that 0.1% of this country owns five times as much wealth as the bottom 50%. So if you believe that, for instance, the Civil Rights Act is good and shouldn’t be repealed, eventually you will have to stand up for yourself and other Americans, and you will have to state that the people advocating for the opposite are wrong.
If Charlie Kirk’s death is MAGA’s “George Floyd moment,” anyone who did not go out of their way to break down the footage of his neck exploding and questioning whether the bullet actually killed him has already cleared the extremely low bar of showing more empathy than the right. In the aftermath of his murder, I doomscrolled through hagiographic posts portraying this midwit podcaster as a divine figure, and it’s clear that these chuds feel entitled to a level of respect and compassion that many of them would never extend to the left. Sure, there are plenty of cases where progressives have cheapened the words “bigot, “nazi,” or “fascist” by overusing them towards people and situations that don’t call for it. But at what point do these words cease to be an insult and become an accurate description of a pattern of behavior? When I wrote about Charlie Kirk’s murder, I brought up an example in which he referred to trans people as an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God” and suggested that they be taken care of “the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and ‘60s.” Is it disparaging to call him a hateful bigot for rationalizing and inciting violence toward a marginalized group of people? Is bigotry and the forceful opposition to it morally equivalent? Many of his supporters would have no qualms with mocking anyone who takes issue with his comments as a PC snowflake, so I’m not particularly sympathetic to their sensitivity and indignation when they’re called out for their garbage behavior, especially when the unofficial battle flag for Trump’s campaign was Fuck Your Feelings.
“We are going to have to live here with one another,” Ezra Klein sternly reminds us in the prologue to his interview with Ben Shapiro. Living amongst people of different cultures and ethnicities and sexualities and religions is the beautiful promise of a multicultural democracy, and it is the exact promise that MAGA savagely opposes. Deciding who you are getting ready to live with and live without is highly indicative of where your empathy lies, because the idea of peaceful coexistence is becoming less of a privilege for trans and queer people, for women, for immigrants, for people reliant on Medicaid and food stamps, for people who detest our dictator president and his coterie of aspiring genocidaires.
MAGA is being criticized and opposed, and the culture of violence and cruelty that they’ve had a large part in creating sometimes ricochets back on them, but we are living in a country that these seething freaks demanded on having. We are now experiencing the Republican proposition for humanity, and many of us are demanding that they stop pursuing this proposition, and Republicans insist that this demand represents harm against them. This proposition is mass immiseration, mass expulsion, mass surveillance, and mass economic suffering, aimed at a swelling tranche of Americans. The Trump regime is not vague about its intentions, and it is not theoretical. It is happening in cities across America, on Venezuelan boats, and all along Gaza. It happened to Charlie Kirk, and if left unchecked, it will eventually come for us all.
Political disagreement should be carried out through argument and persuasion and not through violence, but we can also be committed to humane principles. Klein’s kumbaya approach sounds nice in the abstract, but in this moment, it represents a tendency to whitewash what’s at stake here, to see comity as more important than substantive consequences. It is designed not to defeat the relentless and shattershot depravity that drives all these horrors, but to sink comfortably into it. We will never truly oppose political violence if we can’t see its causes clearly and call it for what it is. We will never overcome the spirit that wants to see more violence and suffering if we can’t come to terms with what we are contending with. We can’t defeat odious ideas by acquiescing to them. If moral clarity in the face of cruelty is polarizing, then polarization becomes the problem to solve, rather than the cruelty. The health of our civilization depends on championing a robust opposition to wealth inequality and environmental destruction and white nationalism, as well as an unwavering advocacy for the working class and the dignity of every human. Any direction forward that doesn’t synthesize these truths into a universal basic decency agenda is a profound waste of time.
Disguising tacit surrender as strategy is an insult to the imagination and empathy of those who think there are other ways of turning down the temperature of rhetoric other than conceding to the people who are turning the temperature up. You can and should be kind to Trump supporters, have civil conversations with them, and even extend a sort of existential sympathy to the economic and political forces that have carried them to their current beliefs. But you do not have to respect MAGA as a belief system, because it certainly will not reciprocate that respect to anyone it deems undeserving of it. At a certain point in our lives, we have to stand for something, or somebody else will tell us where to stand.
Thoughts such as we were when Reagan was Poop Deck Pappy. Only to add that Haidt conducted his tens of thousands of interviews looking for the pattern in political leanings and found the forces at play that create an authoritarian are settled fait accompli at 6 and 7 years old. I cannot say what it means except that it likely speaks for the causative effective existence of unconscious fantasies abt mom and pop and unfriendly breasts and etcetera. Every birth a monstrous prodigy! I put in the moth of Jesus in a fiction once. John Gray knows...