Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
My parents, Alex and Sylvia, grew up as Jewish Americans in NYC during the Great Depression. The Bolshevik Revolution had in part shaped the tenor of that era, but socialism had been popular in the USA before this revolutionary change. In the depression era, FDR, responding to the working-class ferment that swept up folks like my mother and father, critiqued elites as economic royalists. Later as adults, my parents held labor union jobs and voted for Democrats, due in the main to the programs such as the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security and Unemployment Insurance. Consequently, they empathized with the downtrodden.
Empathizing for others, collectively, entered my consciousness as an elementary school student, thanks to the intersections of personal and political changes underway at the time. My parents divorced, casting me into a different social reality in the whites-only suburb in which I grew up. Meanwhile, the efforts of nonwhite people to overcome their second-class status under Jim Crow, was plain as day. Alex and Sylvia opposed Jim Crow. I sensed the importance of supporting this struggle, and did so in my own way, with all the lack of grace at times befit that of a boy figuring out his place in the world.
I vividly recall some of the participants in the struggle for equality during the 1960s, from striking farm workers to black radicals. I witnessed the former during public rallies for the United Farm Workers labor union at the state Capitol in Sacramento. A sense of solidarity with the UFW and their supporters washed over me while standing with my mother and sister, backing these essential workers whose daily toil ensures that everybody eats. Crowds had that kind of impact on me.
For every action there is a reaction. Reaganism, right out of California where I grew up, was a reaction against radical politics of peace and social justice in the 1960s. Empathy for the less fortunate was the enemy of such right-wing politics, which rose as the postwar economy weakened. The Democratic Party of FDR became GOP-lite, not overnight, but imperceptibly, a little like the frog boiling in warming water.
My parents moved to the right, one more than the other, away from the Old Left of their youth. The social stability from union jobs and a shorter working day buckled among the working class. A new socioeconomic playbook rose. I became a recovering Democrat.
The DP, my parents’ party, became what the late Glen Ford, editor of The Black Agenda Report, termed “the more effective evil,” in talking left and walking right. His pointed description focused on those who vote Blue as choosing the lesser evil over the GOP, the white man’s party, after LBJ’s Great Society legislation. In my view, the two parties reflect a lack of choice, a political masquerade.
On that note, President Donald J. Trump, is a kind of culmination of this political abandonment of the working majority for the benefit of the sedentary minority. He has, successfully for the time being, tailored his appeal to voters sold out by one half of the country’s political duopoly. There is resistance to his politics, I suggest in part, due to his and the GOP’s cruelty and lack of empathy. Take the pushback from immigrant communities resisting ICE raids and federal workers facing mass firings under the Elon Musk-led DOGE dismantling of government spending and employment that fails to benefit millionaires and billionaires.
By the time of the 1990s, after Reagan’s blame the government ideology spewed from the Heritage Foundation, launched with $250 million from Joe Coors over a half century ago, my parents were in their golden years. President Clinton attacked the New Deal and Great Society policies with much success. No GOP politician could have outdone him. The political rhetoric praising meritocracy rose, threatening to eclipse the practice of empathy. Nonprofits grew in part as a reaction to the weakening of New Deal and Great Society policies.
The forces of political reaction and transformation had profound impacts, vanquishing the Old Left and New Left. Nevertheless empathy as a human quality that ties humans together remains a force of power. Demonizing equality, immigrants and minorities in an era of economic instability growing daily has a limited shelf life, in my perspective.
Today I feel confident my parents would have resisted Project 2025, which is the latest chapter in scapegoating the Other, and restructuring government to serve the oligarchs such as Trump’s biggest donors. Hate government, not the economic system, was and remains the corporate thesis of the Heritage Foundation. What Noam Chomsky calls a “corporate-run and propaganda managed society” is ripe for radical change starkly opposed to the Project 2025 playbook.
Empathy can empower actions to humanize a changing social order whereby the American empire loses its economic primacy and becomes a part of the multipolar world system. It is an inevitable process, as night follows day and the seasons change. Evolution is baked into the natural and social order we inhabit.
Meanwhile, in the USA, a proposed GOP budget puts access to healthcare on the chopping block for millions of children and low-wage workers receiving Medicaid. This is a strategy of cruelty to pay for extending Trump’s tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires. This is also a politics of stupidity, as Steve Bannon notes, given there are scores of MAGA voters on Medicaid.
Accordingly, empathy is a, not the, solution to weaken an economics and politics of cruelty, whether in its DP or GOP forms. Therefore, expanding the quality of empathy is a next step of necessity. In the meantime, the forces of greed are trying to grab income and wealth from everyone else. Apathy enables that grab. Empathy weakens it. My parents would be on the side of the empathetic, as I am and many else are.
