Our Empathetic Authoritarians
By: Ben Shapiro
A great article exploring the divide in America that seems to be unfixable. The secular progressive bi coastal urban elites are becoming ever more authoritarian in trying to cram their fascist agenda down our throats. To them disagreement is not allowed and one is evil to dare to do it. America is an exceptional nation, generous and fair and multiracial. The people don’t need top down management from the evil fascists in our nation’s capital. I first found this creators syndicate article on one of my favorite sites, World Net Daily but had to seed it from elsewhere.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
(AP Photo/Noah Berger)
America has a crisis of empathy.
That crisis isn't expressed as lack of charitable giving: Americans give approximately seven times what Europeans do to charity per capita. And it isn't expressed as an unwillingness to spend on a governmental level: The United States currently spends more money than any nation in the history of the world.
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The crisis of empathy isn't even about an inability to walk in other people's shoes: America is one of the most racially and religiously tolerant nations on earth.
The American crisis of empathy rests in a simple fact: America is now divided over two mutually exclusive definitions of empathy. That divide is unbridgeable, and it's tearing the country down the middle.
One group of Americans -- call them Neutrality-Driven Empaths -- defines empathy as treating people as individuals capable of free choice and deserving of equality under the law. In this view, empathy manifests in respect for the capacity of other human beings, and in understanding that they make different decisions than you would. This version of empathy doesn't require that we agree with anyone's decisions, but that we understand that it is not our job, absent significant externalities, to rule them.
The other group of Americans -- call them Emotion-Centered Empaths -- believes that empathy means mirroring solidarity with subjective feelings in policy. In this view, empathy means expressing agreement with someone else's specific feelings, refusing to assess whether those feelings are merited or justified and then shaping policy around assuaging those feelings.
Neutrality-Driven Empaths believe that politics ought to be about solutions geared toward equality of individuals before the law. Policy and emotional empathy may come into conflict in this view. Emotion-Centered Empaths believe the opposite: They believe that politics ought to be about emotional solidarity rather than finding solutions. Policy must follow emotional empathy in this view.
To take a rather stark example, consider the question of black student test performance. Neutrality-Driven Empaths will suggest that meritocratic standards are in fact the only neutral rules that can be applied to education, and that such standards have acted as a ladder for a wide variety of human beings of various races; that if a disproportionate number of black students underperform on such tests, that may merit empathy, but it doesn't merit discarding the standards. Emotion-Centered Empaths will, in direct opposition, suggest that the mere fact of black student underperformance requires discarding testing regimes -- to do otherwise would be to abandon solidarity with those who underperform, to ignore the myriad factors that undoubtedly led to the underperformance in the first place.
The battle between Neutrality-Driven Empaths and Emotion-Driven Empaths creates a massive political asymmetry. That's because Neutrality-Driven Empaths acknowledge that while people may disagree over policy, that does not mean they are uncaring or cruel. But for Emotion-Driven Empaths, the opposite is again true: If policy is directly correlated with empathy, failure to agree represents emotional brutality and cruelty. Not only that: There can be no agreeing to disagree, because to suggest that people bear consequences for their actions is in and of itself uncaring and unempathetic. It lacks solidarity.
The empathy gap is a crisis. If you believe that empathy means treating people as individuals capable of reasoning and acting under neutral rules, we can have a society. If you believe that empathy means shaping policy around solidarity with subjective feelings, rules become kaleidoscopic, variable and fluid -- and compulsion is generally necessary in order to effectuate such rules.
Empathy for people as full human beings means recognizing their agency, understanding their differences and holding fast to equality before the law. If we reject those principles in favor of a high-handed and paternalistic approach to power politics, freedom will not survive.
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"The empathy gap is a crisis."
One that Ben widens with every column he publishes.
The last one he wrote about woke cancel culture social media authoritarianism was as great as this article is. This article is the battle between individual rights vs government control and equality of opportunity vs equality of results.
There is no need for you to tell me you think the article is great, you say that about all of the articles you seed. No one likes redundancy.
What the secular progressive left likes is of no concern here.
It is a concern here because this is a discussion forum that permits nasty secular progressions to be members and to reply to you. This is not your playground to spam others with. You are assumed to defend your beliefs or opinions with objective arguments and ideas. Saying that you agree with what you posted is not an argument, but an act of confirmation bias. The idea that you agree with what you posted is assumed unless you have evidence that you have been forced to post threads and ideas against your will.
Jesus-fecking-Christus on a pogo stick you are dense.
Consider me empathetic to your extreme lack of empathy.
What extremist lunatic fringe domestic terrorist Trumpist Fascists like is of no concern to anyone with a brain.
It is the lunatic extreme secular progressive fringe elements that support the fascist dictator BiDen and his agenda that are of no concern to anyone with a brain
I ama Neutrality Driven Empath. I am a caring and generous person who is a happy giver to many charitable causes. I donate to causes that try to help others get back up on their feet and to feed the hungry and provide disaster relief. You have no clue as to how much I help others with time, money,etc.
This evidence based reality driven empath is picking up on anger, loneliness and illness...
We do know you spend a whole lot of it here.
That isn't what Christ meant by do unto others.
The nation would be substantially better without partisans behaving badly.
Why call Biden 'biDen'? Do you think elementary school name-mangling accomplishes anything with adults other than show the name-caller as ridiculous?
And yes, calling Trump names like that has the same effect.
You doing it because someone else did it, however, is even worse.
That has nothing what so ever to do with my 2.1.10 post. Maybe you're talking to someone else ?
No it’s not, but it is what people on your side often did do to Trump.
You made your post a personal shot at me so of course I wasn’t going to feed into that.
If you like PeeWee Herman, you will love Comment 2.1.7.
I read through most of this before my eyes starting glazing over.
I think Ben Shapiro knocked over a lot of straw men.
The remainder of the thread was flushed appropriately along with the accompanying tickets for personal BS.
You are all welcome. SP
"Equality before the law" is nice, and quite necessary, but it isnt all that is necessary. Equality before the law gives us clowns like Trump , in positions of great power, because he has been able to buy legal outcomes that have benefited him.
The true measure of a society is how people are treated who dont have power or influence or good breeding, and who need empathy to help them through the tough parts.
Of course Shapiro is completely about "us against them", he wouldnt have a media career without it.
The middle and working class multiracial American heartland coalition is the above and Trump did a lot to help us.
see comment 3.1.2
The absolute truth. Democrats are the authoritarians in this country.
This is an interesting statement. What did Trump do to help the middle class & below? I don't mean the drastic measures taken for the pandemic, I mean new policies & programs that positively change their lives going forward.
There is no explanation for such blathering...
As you can see from the replies made to your 4.1.4 statement, there are those who refuse to admit that anything Trump did could have helped anybody other than himself.
But pre-pandemic, his policies on taxes and business regulations did have an impact on the lower and middle classes. They were part of helping to reduce unemployment in those groups, especially minorities in those groups, to record lows and was helping to raise salaries in those groups at a much faster pace.
But because those policies also benefitted the upper class and the wealthy there are those who will completely ignore any good out of it for the lower and middle classes.
You're not listing actual changes that caused these supposed effects, so the above statement is just repeating XXJ's blanket statement. The unemployment graph is a straight line down starting in 2010, just as the salary increase line is a straight line up. If TCJA had an effect, there should be some perturbation in graphs following the Act. As far as minorities go, they are the last to benefit from a rising economy and the first to suffer in a falling one. The job gains for blacks under Trump were more than completely wiped out the instant the pandemic hit.
I noticed that Republicans did not run on the tax cuts during the 2018 midterms because those cuts did little for the bottom 80%. His trade war devastated farmers and drove manufacturing into recession. So, the unemployment drop and salary increases were already occurring before Trump took office, and I don't see where anything Trump did affected those things positively.
People will see what they want to see.
The tax cuts that went in Trumps first year did show to play a part in improving the unemployment picture, never said it was the only reason. But it did help. Same with salaries. While salaries were going up before Trump took office the rate of climb did increase after the tax cuts, more so for minorities.
I did say pre-pandemic. Everybody lost out during the pandemic, and minorities and those at the lowest rungs were impacted to a greater degree.
Of course the bottom 80% of people got less out of the tax cuts, they also pay less in taxes overall. If a tax is cut by 10%, then you are paying 10% less than you did before and it doesn't work to compare your tax debt against someone else who is in a different financial bucket.
And I didn't mention the trade wars. You asked if any policy or program of Trumps made a positive change on their lives and I showed you.
Perhaps. Here's a graph of unemployment, notice that there is no perturbation in the line:
When Trump took over, we were at better than full employment. What happens when that it true is that employers are forced to hire people without the prerequisite education or skills. This is unfortunately where many blacks/hispanics lie. I went through this personally in the late '90s. I'd interview 20 people, and if I was lucky, I find a person who might be able to do the job. Perhaps the tax cuts helped, but I can't see where that's much of a factor, if any at all.
The bottom 80% got 20% of the cut, and when the tax cuts for individuals expire, the top 1% will get 90%. So currently, 4/5s of the people are getting 1/5 of the money, and 1/5 of the people, who needed 0 fifths of the money, are getting 4/5s. This is how Republican tax cuts always go. Crumbs for most, a bonanza for the few. This does not help. $450B/year is being borrowed because of the Bush tax cuts, another $160B because of Trump. Imagine if we borrowed just $160B/year for infrastructure, let alone another $450B. That would be an actual investment in creating jobs. But even if you go back to TRA86, that's never what Republicans do, their tax cuts are always a bonanza for those who need nothing. Again, personal experience there. When TRA86 was completely phased in 1988, a friend who had been excited by the Republican hype about the cut was pissed. I remember exactly what he said "It's not even a dollar a day". I was making about 5 times what he was, so maybe I should get 5 times as much, even though I needed 0 times as much. I actually got 40 times what he got.
Republican tax cuts have been a bad idea since I became aware of politics during the Reagan presidency.
You are exactly right. Well said!
Conservatives work tirelessly and effectively to take medical care away from the working poor and the poor, to reduce food benefits for the hungry, and to reduce financial and housing assistance. So, they have an empathy problem in that they obviously don't care about some people. Ben Shapiro tries to mitigate this obvious deficit by defining two types of empathy. Unfortunately for Ben, there's only one type, which is definitionally 'the ability to understand and share the feelings of another'.
He posits that there are 'Neutrality-Driven Empaths' and 'Emotion-Centered Empaths'. The basic difference between the two types is that the first type doesn't do anything and the second type does. The article is actually pretty funny when you think about just how nonsensical it is.
flat out wrong. We work to provide solutions so that people can improve themselves with a hand up and a first step up the ladder they weren’t even on before. We see progress in improving people so that they no longer need to be on social welfare programs. Liberals brag about how many they “help” on these various programs while we take pride in how many our policies lifted up so that they no longer need those services.
Trump showed what we do. Our policies led to the lowest minority unemployment rates ever, real wage increases for the first time in a generation with the bottom 20% getting the biggest % increases. Support for HBC’s, educational choice, prison sentence reform, opportunity zones, tax cuts especially designed to benefit families in the lower income levels. Our idea of helping people is enabling them to get off of and independent of government assistance because we provided them opportunities. The progressive left only brags about how many they can get on public services and become dependent upon government.
Nonsense. Republicans have had more than a decade to come up with something better than ACA. Trump: " we will have a plan that's far better than Obamacare ". Republicans have proposed NOTHING. Republicans have worked tirelessly and effectively to take healthcare away from people. Republicans have knocked a few million of the 20+ million working class Americans who got healthcare through ACA off of it. If not for McCain, they would have knocked all of them off.
I explained what happened wit minorities in 4.1.11 , it had little to do with Trump, if anything at all.
What solutions have you proposed, literally for anything?
We created RX for seniors. We created better senior care with Medicare Advantage which Obama tried and failed to end. We created low cost high deductible health insurance plans with tax free health savings accounts for out of pocket costs and deductibles.
Yes you did, but as usual, you added to the deficit to provide it. About $95B in 2018. Never a tax to pay for anything, just throw it at future generations.
Not a positive. You brought back health 'insurance'. When I started my business, I kept the 'insurance' from my last employer. After 12 years and $22,000 I pinched a nerve. Cost: $3,000 (current $). Covered by my 'insurance': $0. I then called the insurer and checked into coverage. At most 20% with a severely limited caps. If I my problem had been serious, I would have been financially wiped out in my early 40s. ACA got rid of these plans for a reason -- they were and are garbage. They are a mechanism for insurers to make money without responsibility.
The QSEHRA was implemented in Obama's last term to bring back these deductions that the minimum coverage requirements of ACA negated.
In any event, the constant attempts to take insurance from the working poor by damaging/repealing ACA are a clear indicator of how much Republicans care.