Empathy, or why liberals are better than conservatives.
There is a saying that a liberal is a conservative who has not been mugged yet, or has not paid taxes yet. You can really adapt it to whatever policy position you want. And now we liberals can modify it once more: A conservative is a liberal who has not been affected by what he opposes yet.
Yes, I am talking about Senator Rob Portman and his announcement yesterday that 1) his son his gay, 2) and because his son is gay, he has changed his mind about gay marriage.
Allahpundit shares my feelings on the matter.
I’m loath to scold the guy for his reasoning given that I agree with him and that he’s taking on a bit of political risk in doing this, but why did he need his son to come out to get him to look at this issue from the perspective of someone who’s gay? He’s been a professional legislator for years; he’s supposed to consider all sides of an issue when deciding which policy to support. That’s a surprisingly parochial approach to a national debate that’s been rolling around for a solid decade now. Makes me wonder if his feelings on the subject really did change recently or if he’s always quietly been open to gay marriage but only felt politically safe to announce it once he discovered his son’s orientation. Conservative primary voters may be less likely to hold it against him if they think it’s a decision driven by fatherly love for his son.
Indeed. Whenever a conservative does come out (pun intended) in favor of marriage equality, it is because he or she is affected personally by it. Josh Barro explains why it is necessary for a conservative to make it personal in order to be right on the issue:
It’s almost a dare: “What are you going to do, attack my family?” And just as personalization is important for supporters of same-sex marriage, abstraction is important for opponents. It’s a lot easier to oppose same-sex marriage if you pretend the gay people hurt by the policy don’t actually exist. Portman’s gay son allows him to put same-sex marriage opponents on uncomfortably personal turf.
But whether conservatives need the excuse of a personal connection to issue to challenge conservative doctrine that they already reject (as per Allahpundit’s thoughts), or it truly is the reason why they change their minds in the first place, why must conservatives need the personal connection to an issue to feel empathy? Don’t they already have empathy? Aren’t they already human? Or does being a conservative mean you are one selfish narcissistic bastard/bitch who has no empathy for anyone else in the human race?
Kevin Drum counters me:
I do wish conservatives could demonstrate a little empathy even for people and causes that don’t directly affect their own lives, but it’s not as if this is an exclusively conservative thing. It’s a human thing. Personal experience always touches us more deeply than facts and figures, and in the case of gay marriage we all knew this was how progress would be made. People would see gay characters on TV and shed a little bit of their discomfort. They’d learn that old friends are gay and decide they wanted to stay friends anyway. They’d learn their children are gay, and decide that they still wanted the best for them, even if that means supporting same-sex marriage.
Alright. I will concede that being a conservative does not necessarily mean you are one selfish narcissistic bastard/bitch. But take me for instance. I am liberal who does not have close friends or family who are gay and I am not gay myself. Yes, I do have gay acquaintances and colleagues, but I have not been personally affected by someone I love coming out as gay. And yet somehow I am for marriage equality. How can that be? Can it be that liberals just possess more empathy and feeling than conservatives? Can it be that liberals just possess more empathy by nature, and in fact, it is that empathy for their fellow mankind that makes them liberals in the first place? I think so. And since empathy is a regarded as a better character trait than narcissism, that is why we are better than conservatives. Indeed, narcissism is generally considered a personality disorder.
As an aside, Senator Portman was generally considered to be the frontrunner for the Republican Vice Presidential Nomination. Indeed much of the speculation before Romney chose Paul Ryan as that Portman, due to being from Ohio and being a former Budget chief and fiscal conservative, was the likely choice. I wonder if Mitt Romney, upon learning that Portman’s son was or could be gay, chose Paul Ryan because of that. Who would though have thought that George W. Bush would be a better human being than Mitt Romney, for at least Bush could stand it to have a running mate that had a gay child.
Let’s remember that President Obama also evolved on gay rights. To me it is pretty clear that both Obama’s and Portman’s positions on gay rights were politically driven both before and after their evolutions, owing to changes in society. But who cares? That’s how politics works – you stick your finger in the wind and go with what the people want, or you are history. It’s only since Reagan that it was considered a virtue to have unchangeable principles, a dubious proposition.
If thier empathy really only extends to people they can physically touch, If we have to wait for every congressional Republican to have a poor person in thier family in order for them to understand the real economy – we are screwed.
Republicans don’t give a f**k whether people are gay or not, as long as power and money keep flowing to the 1%. Social conservative positions were useful to them as long as it helped them win elections. Now that social conservative positions are starting to work against them, it costs them nothing to abandon them. They know they have lost the culture wars. Their problem now is how to keep the SoCons in their coalition, which looks to be a bigger problem in primaries than in the general. But they will still keep sending their clownish SoCons to Washington from retrograde regions of the country, so we will always have to contend with them.
I think this ties in with all the Republican Wah-wah about the party having a perception problem. It’s not a problem of perception — the American voters are finally perceiving them as exactly what they are. Totally self-centered, and lacking in empathy for anyone outside the 1%. Jeb Bush told the folks in DC for the Conservative doo-dah last night that the party’s problem is perception. The party’s problem is that they stand for only 1% of the population and screw everyone else. Tough to get elected when that’s your base. As women and minorities exercise more and more political power the remaining deluded white males aren’t going to swing the balance any more. That’s not perception, that’s votes.
Puck you nailed it
Come to think of it, Reagan making unchangeable principles and absolute truth into a virtue is really anti-democratic, and has now turned into a trap for Republicans. Reagan forgot about the pendulum.
Hate to think what personal experience might change their minds on guns.
Empathy is precisely what liberals today are lacking. The US government’s continuous killing, due-process-free imprisonment, and other rights abuses under the War on Terror banner has affected one group far more than any other: Muslims and, increasingly, American Muslims. Politically, this has been the key fact enabling this to endure and it’s why blogs like this one support the drone strikes. (“And let me say something else. I wholeheartedly endorse using drones on foreign enemy battlefields like Yemen, Pakistan or Afghanistan to kill terrorists. And if those terrorists happen to be American citizens engaged in treason and warfare against the United States, so be it.” –Delaware Dem on last Friday’s open thread.)
Put simply, if you’re not Muslim, and you never live in, visit,or travel to middle eastern countries, it’s very easy to dismiss, minimize or mock these issues because you can easily tell yourself that they don’t affect you or your family and therefore there is no reason to care. It’s a “black helicopter fantasy” in the words of this blog. And since the vast, vast majority of Democratic politicians and progressive media commentators and bloggers are not Muslim, one continuously sees this mentality shaping reaction to these issues. I don’t sense a lot of empathy, frankly, coming from liberals in this country anymore.
@Dan:
1. US Government ≠ Liberals.
2. Obama ≠ Liberal.
3. Just because progressive blogs aren’t currently talking about the struggles of Muslims in America does not mean liberals do not empathize with that cause. It is one of a plethora of human rights violations that progressives are upset about. You mistake lip service for actual empathy. A strange mistake indeed.
4. Keith Ellison, Keith Ellison, Keith Ellison, Keith Ellison.
PainesMe, I agree with your first two points. If it wasn’t clear from my post, and it may not have been, I was specifically addressing some of the reactions to U.S. government actions, not the actions themselves. That said, I’m not sure that these human rights violations actually have many progressives particularly upset, or at least fewer than should be. To your third point, it’s not the absense of commentary, but the things that are actually being said that to me demonstrate a serious lack of empathy. Incidentally, I say all this stuff as an otherwise fan of this blog (for whatever that’s worth).
It’s pretty simple. Conservatives lack a conscience.
…………And brains
Besides being completely tone- deaf too
Poor dears, we should put them in zoos so we can study them and ensure their extinction
“conservatives lack a conscience.” oh, please. i’m a liberal, but demonizing the other side is usually a conservative move. do you really believe that your political theories are the only ones that can be legitimately held? (i speak here of legitimate political theory, not palin-style babbling). you might come to a different conclusion about what’s right, but insisting on a single response to a complex world is awfully totalitarian for folks who claim to be open-minded. you can try to convince the other side, but telling them they start from a morally corrupt position won’t help. they might reason poorly (i think they often do), but that doesn’t mean they all “lack a conscience.”
Van Buren: Neuroscientists have found that liberals’ brains and conservatives’ brains do not react the same to the same stimuli. The notion that conservatives lack empathy, or maybe are a quart low, is not merely an insult.
but the point is that (thoughtful) conservatives don’t necessarily think they’re being immoral or selfish when they espouse personal responsibility etc. they might actually think their ideas would ultimately raise all the boats. where liberals see empathy as an unalloyed good, conservatives might see a dangerous naivete. liberals don’t like it when conservatives push for rules based on their (sure, often ridiculous) sense of morality, but think it’s ok for them to do the same thing. do liberals think they have this all figured out and nobody else need apply? that sense of moral superiority doesn’t leave much room for compromise, but maybe some liberals prefer that everybody else be silent. kind of playing devil’s advocate here.
“where liberals see empathy as an unalloyed good, conservatives might see a dangerous naivete.”
I think that’s true. But I disagree with the premise that conservatives don’t feel empathy. Look at how much empathy they have for “job creators,” or at least the small business owners among them. Granted, they vastly overestimate how many such people are out there, but they feel empathy for their struggles against regulation and taxes and such.
Your point is a good one.