This journalist says we're being drained of our empathy. But it's not irreversible

As debates rage about the long-term impacts of President Donald Trump’s harshest policies on things like immigration and gender, many Democrats have bemoaned what they see as the loss of empathy in American politics.

Some pundits have urged patience, claiming that Trump supporters will rediscover a sense of compassion when they start to feel adverse effects from Trump’s actions. But Slate editor and host of the Amicus podcast Dahlia Lithwick doesn’t think that’s going to work.

She wrote recently about the lack of empathy on both ends of the political spectrum, and spoke more about it on The Show.

Nils Folke Anderson

Full conversation

DAHLIA LITHWICK: This is Trump's superpower, right? I think that we have to be really mindful of the fact that if you have an entire political narrative built up around the idea that your suffering is caused by sort of evil others, whether it's, you know, the Marxists or the communists or increasingly just Democrats, then the idea that they are, you know, taking one to the face becomes really gratifying.

And so I think that we have to be very, very careful about saying like, oh, folks are eventually gonna be, you know, awakened from this slumber and realize they actually deeply care about the suffering of others because I think that kind of cashing in on the suffering of others is the coin of the realm right now.

DINGMAN: Well, and you referred to it as Trump's superpower a moment ago, but one of the other things you're talking about in this piece is the array of methods by which he does this.

LITHWICK: Right. Well, I think you can do two things at the same time. You can make the outsider, the migrant, you know, the what what Trump would call “the illegals.” You can make them smaller than they are and also bigger than they are, and you can do that at the same time, right?

And so the image that I was really struck by was Kristi Noem, you know, going down to the COT prison in El Salvador and photographing herself in front of these kind of blurred out, anonymized, faceless alleged gang members, all of whom were deported without due process or habeas corpus rights or any semblance of a fair hearing.

And one of the ways you make that OK is you just make them this completely fungible set of anonymized half-naked men, and that way you make them, you know, they're, you're not just othering them, you're sort of eradicating them as individuals.

And then the other half of that play, and it's very clever, is to make any one of them seem much bigger than they are. They, you know, through the rhetoric turned Kilmar Abrego Garcia into this nefarious, you know, global sex trafficking, you know, gang lord, which was all out of proportion to the proof that they had. And, you know, again, if they had proof of that, prove it in a court.

DINGMAN: Can you talk a little bit about how this is happening on the left?

LITHWICK: There's just such exulting, Sam, in the idea that someone who voted for Trump never expected, you know, his workers would be deported, and now his farm is suffering, you know, somebody who, voted for Trump and now is like, you know, being, deported willy-nilly without a trial. The sort of joy, the triumphal joy, I think it's an, another way of numbing ourselves to actual suffering.

And I think that I, I, I'm certainly sure that it has no persuasive value, right? I don't think you're going to flip any Trump voter by demeaning and diminishing their suffering. And so they are mirror images of each other.

I don't think you get to say, oh, you know, Trump made me numb, or alternatively, you know, Trump supporters made me numb to human suffering. I think what we need to be able to say is that taking triumphal joy in the suffering of the other is problematic, and, and we choose to give that away.

And I think the other thing that I really wanted to try to capture is that when you are seeing such widespread suffering, it's really easy to go small and say,aAs long as my kids are OK, you know, as long as my community is OK, right. That is also a moral choice.

DINGMAN: Yes, but as you point out, also a conscious tool of authoritarian regimes, right?

LITHWICK: I think that's right, and I think you can study any number of, you know, Hannah Arendt and Tim Snyder and … I mean, everybody who talks about how authoritarianism takes hold, talks about these strategies for kind of thickening the membrane between you and the others, so that either you're afraid to speak up or you don't even know what's true anymore, right.

You're in, in this fog of war, and so you don't believe anything anymore. And so all you can do is make sure your kids are fed and, you know, you've got your your fridge, you know, full of, of, of healthy food, and I, I understand very much that that's a targeted, you know, way to drain people of empathy, but I think we should be very, very aware that it's deliberate.

DINGMAN: Yeah, by encouraging people to keep their focus small and intimate and not pay as much attention to things that are happening outside the walls of their homes, it creates a broader lane for the administration to pursue their initiatives, which many people have begun to argue bear strong resemblance to these autocratic regimes that we've been talking about.

LITHWICK: I think that's exactly right. You have a lot of very, very dyed in the wool, serious credible progressives backing away from robust immigration policies and saying, oh, well, you know, maybe, you know, we shouldn't be so generous in our thinking about what kind of country we want to be.

Sometimes it comes dressed up as, you know, political savvy, right? Well, let's just, you know, support for, you know, trans service members just doesn't poll well, right? Or, you know, support for open borders, whatever that means, doesn't poll well.

It's absolutely the same impulse, which is pick your battles, go small, convince people that you know, OK, it's only trans athletes, that doesn't affect me, which is precisely the paradigm being used about it's only, you know, criminal illegals. It doesn't affect me.

DINGMAN: One of the things that you're also saying in this piece is that this wearing down, sanding down of our capacity for empathy is not irreversible, that there is, as you put it, “a weirdly urgent task.” How would you characterize that weirdly urgent task?

LITHWICK: I'm just gonna say it, it's gonna sound flip, but like some of this is really fun, right? It's being in community. It's go to rallies, it's not sit at home alone. It's not surround yourself with kind of toxic paralyzing news that makes you feel as though there's nothing to be done.

You know, there's amazing scholarship about how in some communist regimes, just the act of sitting around in your backyard, just being in community with people becomes a real force for generating a sense of community and empathy. And so I, I think that we actually know exactly what this looks like.

And in some sense, it looks a little bit like some of the No Kings protests we saw recently, which is just, you know, this corporeal, put your body in the street, talk to somebody who you don't necessarily agree with. It's not just teaching yourself, you know, to be powerful and to be a moral agent and to have empathy.

It's actually that the, aggregated across societies, this is how change happens, and so it's not simply that you're kind of working on yourself. It's that if we all do a tiny bit of this, the world changes.