Definition of Conservativism: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” -- Frank Wilhoit, Ohio Composer
Wilhoit’s insight on tribalism has stayed with me for years and is more relevant than ever. In-group and out-group. Abusers and victims. Powerful and powerless. Dominators and dominated. Conquerors and vanquished. From one angle, these are pairings of opposites, the former of each pair originating in a lack of empathy. In fact, the refusal or inability to genuinely attempt to experience another's perspective is foundational to unbalanced power dichotomies. For our purpose here, another is the other tribe, the one our tribe has no desire to protect, the one we may even, in fact, want to subjugate.
How far back does this tribalism extend? Certainly an anthropologist would answer this question with something like "millions of years," but we will not move backward that far in time today. Let's travel back to perhaps the gold standard of tribalism in United States history: The Civil War. I offer the question of who won the Civil War? Who emerged victorious over the long run? The answer is not as obvious as a document signed on April 9, 1865 at Appomattox Court House.
In fact, did the Civil War in truth end? Or did the fighting shape-shift and go underground? Reconstruction failed, or rather more correctly, was abandoned as it began to succeed. The national divisions never healed; in a genuine sense the South actually won the war, or, at least, won the peace. This is a haunting thought and an argument with great persuasive power that only grows with each passing year. One need only study the history of Reconstruction to see the evidence. The heart of the matter is the utter abandonment of the reconstruction process in the 1860-1870s, when the process was, in actuality, producing results. The Atlantic magazine dedicated an entire issue to the failure (withdrawal) of Reconstruction and the legacy of the Civil War in December 2023, an issue that highlights the ghosts of division that still haunt us.
The story of the Civil War's legacy, among other things, is a narrative steeped in fear, hatred, and lack of empathy that forced cruel divisions. The American South's chattel slavery epitomized the dearth of empathy, and the subsequent post-slavery persecution and segregation of black Americans kept festering wounds open until the present day.
Yes, the present day. Those wounds never healed. Large swaths of America never looked in the mirror and accepted the truth of the Civil War’s cruel origins and certainly never made a comprehensive attempt to take responsibility and make restitution the way Germany did for the Holocaust. Some readers may disagree and immediately point to the Civil Rights improvements in the 1960's, to which I would promptly issue the rejoinder: "The Civil Rights gains of the 1960's were the beginning of a conversation, not the end, and that conversation has been back-burnered by the current presidential administration and justice department.
And now, because of the increasing polarization, outside observers wonder if we are headed for a modern Civil War, whatever that would look like. This pre-election article by Bruce Stokes of the UK, "Could the US be headed for a National Divorce?" (Chatham House, Feb 2024) briefly highlights the stark trenches along ideological and political lines and includes this prescient - if perhaps obvious - insight : "The outcome of the 2024 US election is unlikely to resolve these differences." On target, Bruce. Right on target.
Even our former friends across the pond see, then, that destructive division will continue. Given the 2024 election, our electoral map, the astoundingly short-sighted voting bloc that put the Distended Pretender into office, and his administration's utterly atrocious, spiteful, pitiless first four months, it is difficult not to see this purposeful, architected movement toward division as perhaps the primary force - behind only capitalism itself - hindering our abilities to solve urgent issues of the day, for example, the effort to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Today's target, then, is divisiveness born of empathy-deficiency, and the us/them mindset cultivated and propagated by the current administration, its vassals, lackeys and stooges (Oh my!) and assented to by its followers. Empathy-deficiency as a theme of course pre-dates the current administration, but the MAGA forces are working overtime to perfect it.
One must employ a considerable supplementation of high school history books to uncover the unvarnished history of America, the un-whitewashed version. We can trace the history of the conservative movement's successful efforts to bring into the fold groups that by definition manifest low empathy - the gun lobby, extremist hate groups, evangelicals, anti-immigrant groups and more - back to the 1970's and before. Remember the way the ERA died a slow agonizing death? Remember Ronald Reagan opining dishonestly about welfare queens? Remember how between 1972 and 1980 the Republican party did a complete about-face on supporting gun control?
This has been an architected progression! One can see this lack of empathy on full display in the Bill of Big Bad Betrayal before Congress now, which will nullify health insurance for a projected 11 million people and add $2.4 trillion to the national debt (American Prospect). Anyone belonging to a group that is "other" deserves no health, care, right, MAGA folks? Well, at least you have your guns, I suppose. And your ignorant hatred.
In a genuine sense, then, the American dream has gone off the rails, the sense of rugged individualism corrupted to the extreme of seeking not just to ignore the government, but instead to destroy the government altogether… which is so terribly unfortunate in a time when we need inspired leadership more than ever.
Many believe, as do I, that government is a shield, not a weapon, and our government (the artificial biggest fish created for our protection) has responsibilities to shield us from the leviathan (crony capitalism, manipulation by AI/Tech, environmental destruction, foreign bad actors). Now, one can have reasonable disagreements about how much the government should help, and how far its responsibilities extend, but one cannot make a sane argument for the government's complete abdication of responsibility for its citizens' welfare in a time fraught with anxiety, manipulation by tech companies, financial uncertainty, escalating health care costs, looming climate disaster and the impending upheaval of large-scale job loss at the "hands" of AI.
Government should not be expected to solve everyone's problems, but government absolutely should mitigate pain-points involving the general welfare such as low-or-no-cost healthcare, and concerns for a safe-living environment, realms that are largely out of the typical citizen's control. To that point, government - the Federal Government of the United States - should obviously refrain from enacting policies that are purposely cruel, or laws that inflict "arbitrary and capricious" changes on the citizenry. Effective and moral government demands such an approach.
Today I highlight the current presidential administration's autocratic efforts to do just that: enact arbitrary and capricious cruelty to manipulate its base through fear and to weaponize the the base’s unfortunate black-and-white view of the world. The administration is attempting to supercharge its base's low tolerance for difference, its lack of empathy, and fear of the future.
Consider the cruelty in a wedge issue such as immigration and recent occurrences manifesting a lack of empathy, as in the pre-election demonization of Haitian immigrants. These legal immigrants in Springfield, OH, who possess protected status, were falsely accused by our autocrat and vice autocrat of eating pets (citation: go back and watch the 2024 Presidential/VP debates and the aftermath). If we broaden our scope to this week we see hundreds of thousands who had protected status are seeing it revoked arbitrarily, as Stephen Miller cackles in the background.
Or consider the glee and cruelty of the autocrat's ongoing efforts to conduct the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” (Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, May 30, 2025) along with the illegal deportation to an horrific foreign gulag of Venezuelan nationals. Then consider the cruelty of the ICE raids in Los Angeles, leading to significant mostly-peaceful protests that are absolutely justified. Including dozens more examples in this piece would be trivially easy.
Which brings me to my main point. What is empathy? Bear with me as I preface my definition with a reference to recent research conducted by Scientific American on the actual difference(s) between what we so insufficiently call conservatives and liberals.
Conservatives vs. Liberals, the essential difference: People high in hierarchical world belief [conservatives] see the world as full of differences that matter because they usually reflect something inherent, real and significant. Such individuals often separate things of greater value from things of less value. You might imagine that, to them, the world looks full of big, bold black lines.
The opposite view—held by people low in this belief—tends to perceive differences as superficial and even silly [liberals]. For individuals with this perspective, the world is mostly dotted lines or shades of gray. (To reiterate, primals concern tendencies only. Even people with a strong hierarchical world belief see some lines as arbitrary.) In our work, this primal was high in conservatives and low in liberals. --Scientific American
Is not empathy the ability to compassionately smear those big, bold black lines noted above, to see something "inherent, real and significant" in people or their points of view, to see true value in not overemphasizing phantom lines of demarcation? With big bold black lines, very little room is left for nuance, and our lives are lived in a deep pool of nuance. Life is messy. Moral issues are often messy, complicated and ambiguously gray. We can argue over which differences matter and which are superficial, but we should never elevate differences or create artificial differences that purposely inflict cruelty or create hierarchies of people with greater and lesser value. We have a word for that, and that word is scapegoating. And that is what we are patently seeing with this administration; sadly, we all know where that leads.
And one important distinction here: the orchestrators of the ongoing cruelty are not actually conservatives at all. True conservatives move slowly, value stability and social order, and deliberate excessively before agreeing to change, while on the other hand, the architects of our current feckless administration are nothing short of Destroyers.
If we are indeed now held captive to destructive rulers, what comes next? What will be the long-term effect of our empathy-deficient, national dance with doom? George Packer (The Atlantic, June 2025) tells us loudly and clearly:
Even if most Americans haven’t abandoned their private sense of empathy, many don’t seem terribly bothered by the rancidness of their leaders. I confess that this indifference astonishes me. It might be the ugliest effect of Trump’s return—the rapid normalization of spectacular corruption, the desensitization to lawless power, the acceptance of moral collapse. Eventually it will coarsen us all.
Yes, among many other negative outcomes, it will most certainly coarsen us all individually. It will sandblast, too, the frayed social bonds that so precariously hold us together. If my thoughts here are sandblasting your well-being, I certainly can empathize. If you feel overwhelmed by our shared and mostly self-inflicted predicament, by the daily dose of malignity, you are not alone. If you feel like "human civilization is on a suicidal trajectory," as Brian McClaren states in his 2025 book Life After Doom, know you are not alone. So many of us feel it, that ever-present buzz of anxiety that results in constant flight-or-flight mode. What, if anything, can we do to turn the tide?
Well, the tide may turn. On the other hand, good fortune may elude us, and we activists (which should be all of us now) often project public strength and righteous anger but quietly have private moments of great, sometimes debilitating, anxiety. I as well have been searching for answers. The best advice I have seen so far is from Brian McClaren in the aforementioned book Life After Doom, largely a meditation on how to set one's mind to meet the moment, for "...people who know how much trouble we're in [and for whom] pretending to have hope is more exhausting than waking up to reality." McClaren writes with his sites on climate disaster but makes a compelling argument that his approach to mindset is relatable to nearly all possible dystopian futures possibilities.
While offering my readers a comprehensive plan is a post for another day (candidly, I do not have a comprehensive plan yet), I can propose some thoughts to begin a conversation on this topic: Begin to divorce yourself from outcomes, focus on inner defiance and sovereignty of mind. Make reading literature a part of that process.
McClaren recommends in Chapter 16 of Life After Doom to take the advice of Alexis Wright to reclaim your mind as essentially a guarded citadel that cannot be breached by the madness, the outcomes of each abhorrent chess move by the opponent:
Alexis Wright is an Aboriginal writer from Australia...she understands that the end of the world has been happening for centuries for indigenous people... She understands that colonizers and colonized need to be liberated from the mindset of colonization. The first step toward freedom, she says, is to decolonize or decapitalize the mind so you can develop strengths that will not be defined by how others believe you should think... she calls this liberation "sovereignty of mind."
She writes, when you move into the realm of your own sovereignty of mind by shielding yourself from the kinds of interferences that rob you of the ability to think straight, that sap your spirit or block you from seeing and making your own judgment, then you're able to govern your own spirit and imagination.
You can be cells of resistance, outposts of transformation, seed beds of beauty. That is the best future I can imagine for organized religion in these dangerous times. Instead of helping nostalgic people inhabit bubbles of the past, religious communities can help people go forward on this inward migration towards sovereignty of mind, we are in defiance of a rising level of ugliness, people cultivate beauty...
McClaren's advice to make your mind a cell of resistance is applicable to all communities, not just religious ones. We can all build the resistance in our minds, the one place that one can fortify and shield from virtually all outside interference. I think this is where we all have to start the process of building resistance. We start by thinking clearly, blocking interference, and reinforcing habits that will serve us in the long run. To build strength, detach from the outcomes and focus on making your mind itself a rock of moral defiance, McClaren tells us.
Practically speaking, one way to foster your own sovereignty of mind is to immerse yourself in literature, as suggested by Maria Popova (The Marginalian) quoting Olga Tokarczuk’s "Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech": Popova: [Tokarczuk] reminds us that literature is also an invaluable tool of empathy [emphasis BTS]— an antidote to the divisiveness so mercilessly exploited by our “social” media.
Tokarczuk: Literature is one of the few spheres that try to keep us close to the hard facts of the world, because by its very nature it is always psychological, because it focuses on the internal reasoning and motives of the characters, reveals their otherwise inaccessible experience to another person, or simply provokes the reader into a psychological interpretation of their conduct. Only literature is capable of letting us go deep into the life of another being, understand their reasons, share their emotions and experience their fate.
The point here is that literature is enjoyable for its own sake but is also a tool for practicing empathy, as it requires us to enter into the mind of its characters and inspect their motives, behaviors and inner life. By inspecting the motives and behaviors and inner life of imaginary characters, we access a safe sandbox for difficult conversations with the characters and ourselves and gain insight into our own inner life. Perhaps we also increase our empathy, and in that regard hopefully we expand the in-group in our lives to include far more of those folks that the law binds but does not protect.
