The New York Times regularly features roundtable discussions between a few of their Opinion writers that are always fascinating to me. It's like I'm peering into an ideological ant farm, watching them earnestly go about their business while being completely unaware that the entire universe outside of the ant farm exists.
Earlier this week, the Times offered its latest installment in this roundtable series, this one featuring Michelle Cottle, Jamelle Bouie, and perennial Never Trump fainting couch denizen David French. These are video discussions that the Times also releases a text version of with a different headline. Let's just get the headlines out of the way first.
Video: "Trump, MAGA, and 'Toxic Empathy'"
Text: "Why Politics Feels So Cruel Right Now"
Welcome to the ant farm.
My overwhelming response when first seeing this on Tuesday was, "DO THESE IDIOTS EVER HEAR THEMSELVES?!?!?" I am, however, a professional writer, and that one sentence can't pass for a column. I put it on the back burner for 24 hours until I had more words. When I first dove back into the news this morning, I double-checked to make sure that I hadn't hallucinated all of it. Of course I hadn't; even the wildest acid trip can't be weirder than American leftists are these days (any days). They went through the looking glass when President Trump was first elected and thought that everything on the other side was just a smidge too normal for their tastes.
Now I'll share two quotes from the beginning of the conversation to establish how quickly things can go off the rails in these instances. The first is from Cottle:
For years now, progressives have been engaged in a competition of sorts, which is like, “In the hierarchy of intersectionality, who has the most right to be upset?” And that has put conservative white men, in particular, on the defensive at a time when they’re already freaked out about shifting social and economic hierarchies. So a lot of people are tired of feeling guilty, and they have been very open to the idea that empathy or compassion is a weakness.
Am I completely off base here? Are you guys seeing this? And if so, when and where did you notice it happening?
Every once in a great while, a Times Opinion writer will tiptoe near reality, as Cottle did there in her comment about progressives. Immediately shifting the conversation to the reaction of conservative white men is standard operating procedure in the mainstream media. It can never be about any culpability on the part of the left; it's all about how conservatives are reacting.
The first response comes from Bouie, who has never met a topic that he can't be completely wrong about:
I think I disagree somewhat with the premise that American progressives have been engaged in this game establishing a hierarchy of oppression.
It's like he was born in the ant farm. Since it's Pride Month over in Leftyland, he should check out the jockeying for position that has been going on in the LGBTQ+ rainbow mafia community for the last umpteen years. Heads up, Jamelle: it also wasn't conservatives who were debating in 2020 and 2024 whether Kamala Harris was "black enough."
The mere fact that Jamelle Bouie is opining on white men at all is laughable. The progressives have maintained for years that people aren't entitled to opinions if they don't share the same race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Their rules, not mine.
Dullard's dullard French posits that we (Trump people) think that empathy is "making us weak," but that we're actually "desperate" for it ourselves.
Leave it to French to always get around to some boilerplate leftist projection. I think we know who is really desperate for empathy here, don't we?
That brings me to the utter absurdity of this conversation, on which I will now share my conservative white male thoughts. I don't speak for all of us, but I'll give it a shot.
The first is that men — conservative white or otherwise — have had a distrustful relationship with emotions since, well, ever. Once you introduce the word "feelings" — which is in the definition of empathy — we go a little arm's-length. This probably won't come as a shock to regular readers of mine, but I have been accused of lacking empathy many times. Full disclosure: I'm ragingly egocentric, so empathy is a tough go for me.
That does not, however, mean that I don't have feelings or the capacity to at least consider the experiences of others. By definition, empathy is "the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation." It's not an acquired skill, so lamenting the loss of it en masse on one side of the political aisle is rather foolish.
Even if empathy were an acquired skill, the leftists have ensured that we wouldn't be able to pick it up. Using a word of theirs, they have been "otherizing" us seemingly forever. They treat us like a feral subspecies of outsiders who are knuckle-dragging rubes to whom they mysteriously manage to lose elections. From my perspective, there are only so many times someone can call me a Nazi before I cease caring about what they feel.
OK, there's only one time.
So, little proggies, if you want politics to be less cruel, maybe pump the brakes on using "Nazi," "Hitler," and "Racist!" as your default responses to everything that people like me say or do.
Oh, and maybe always begin your search for answers to queries like these with some quality time in front of a mirror.
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