Do I feel empathy for Trump voters? That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot
‘‘Love and kindness’’ became a staple for me on the campaign trail. Never the core message of the day, never a full-fledged ‘‘new politics of meaning’’ call to arms, but something I’d come back to again and again, and that audiences nearly always responded to, as if they were thirsty for it.
With all the rotten news on television and all the negativity in the race, a lot of people wanted to be reassured about the basic goodness of our country and our hope for a better, kinder future. When we started using the phrase ‘‘love trumps hate,’’ it caught on like wildfire among our supporters.
There were times when I listened to huge crowds chanting those words, and for a minute I’d get swept up in the swell of positive energy and think it might really carry us all the way.
I’ve spent many hours since the election wondering whether there was more we could have done to get that message through to an angry electorate in a cynical time.
There’s been so much said and written about the economic hardships and declining life expectancy of the working-class whites who embraced Donald Trump.
But why should they be more angry and resentful than the millions of blacks and Latinos who are poorer, die younger, and have to contend every day with entrenched discrimination?
Why were many people who were enchanted by Barack Obama in 2008 so cynical in 2016 after he saved the economy and extended health care to millions who needed it?
I went back to de Tocqueville. After studying the French Revolution, he wrote that revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst, but in places where expectations are most unmet.
So if you’ve been raised to believe your life will unfold a certain way – say, with a steady union job that doesn’t require a college degree but does provide a middle-class income, with traditional gender roles intact and everyone speaking English – and then things don’t work out the way you expected, that’s when you get angry. It’s about loss. It’s about the sense that the future is going to be harder than the past.
Fundamentally, I believe that the despair we saw in so many parts of America in 2016 grew out of the same problems that Lee Atwater and I were worried about 25 years ago.
Too many people feel alienated from one another and from any sense of belonging or higher purpose. Anger and resentment fill that void and can overwhelm everything else: tolerance, basic standards of decency, facts, and certainly the kind of practical solutions I spent the campaign offering.
Do I feel empathy for Trump voters? That’s a question I’ve asked myself a lot. It’s complicated. It’s relatively easy to empathise with hardworking, warmhearted people who decided they couldn’t in good conscience vote for me after reading that letter from Jim Comey . . . or who don’t think any party should control the White House for more than eight years at a time . . . or who have a deeply held belief in limited government, or an overriding moral objection to abortion.
I also feel sympathy for people who believed Trump’s promises and are now terrified that he’s trying to take away their health care, not make it better, and cut taxes for the super-rich, not invest in infrastructure. I get it. But I have no tolerance for intolerance. None. Bullying disgusts me.
I look at the people at Trump’s rallies, cheering for his hateful rants, and I wonder: Where’s their empathy and understanding? Why are they allowed to close their hearts to the striving immigrant father and the grieving black mother, or the LGBT teenager who’s bullied at school and thinking of suicide? Why doesn’t the press write think pieces about Trump voters trying to understand why most Americans rejected their candidate? Why is the burden of opening our hearts only on half the country?
And yet I’ve come to believe that for me personally and for our country generally, we have no choice but to try. In the spring of 2017, Pope Francis gave a TED Talk. Yes, a TED Talk. It was amazing. This is the same pope whom Donald Trump attacked on Twitter during the campaign.
He called for a ‘‘revolution of tenderness’’. What a phrase! He said: ‘‘We all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent ‘I,’ separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone.’’ He said that tenderness ‘‘means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future.’’
On all my long walks in the woods and quiet days at home, when I’m not losing my mind about something I’ve read in the newspaper or on Twitter, this is what I’m thinking about. I’m coming around to the idea that what we need more than anything at this moment in America is what you might call ‘‘radical empathy’’.
This isn’t too different from the ‘‘mutuality of respect’’ I hoped for at Wellesley all those years ago. I’m older now. I know how hard this is and how cruel the world can be. I’m under no illusions that we’ll start agreeing on everything or stop having fierce debates about the future of our country – nor should we.
But if 2016 taught us anything, it should be that we have an urgent imperative to recapture a sense of common humanity.
Each of us must try to walk in the shoes of people who don’t see the world the way we do. President Obama put it very well in his farewell address.
He said white Americans need to acknowledge ‘‘that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the sixties; that when minority groups voice discontent, they’re not just engaging in reverse racism or practicing political correctness; that when they wage peaceful protest, they’re not demanding special treatment but the equal treatment our Founders promised.’’
And, for people of colour, it means understanding the perspective of ‘‘the middle-aged white man who from the outside may seem like he’s got all the advantages, but who’s seen his world upended by economic, cultural, and technological change’’.
And, practicing ‘‘radical empathy’’ means more than trying to reach across divides of race, class, and politics, and building bridges between communities. We have to fill the emotional and spiritual voids that have opened up within communities, within families, and within ourselves as individuals.
That can be even more difficult, but it’s essential. There’s grace to be found in those relationships.
Grace and meaning and that elusive sense that we’re all part of something bigger than ourselves. I know this isn’t the language of politics, and some will roll their eyes again, just as they always have. But I believe as strongly as I ever have that this is what our country needs. It’s what we all need as human beings trying to make our way in changing times. And it’s the only way I see forward for myself. I can carry around my bitterness forever, or I can open my heart once more to love and kindness. That’s the path I choose.
What Happened
Hillary Clinton Simon & Schuster, $49.95
I’ve spent many hours since the election wondering whether there was more we could have done to get that message through to an angry electorate in a cynical time.