The absence of empathy
The next time you meet a MAGA (and they let you get a word in edgewise) ask them this: “Yes or no, was Adolf Hitler an evil man?” You can even set the question up by observing that you notice Republicans have a hard time answering yes or no questions, and you bet they can’t either.
I don’t know what specific answer you will get, but I suspect you will get very few unequivocal yeses. Many of them won’t want to betray their secret admiration for the twentieth century’s most evil human being by saying something disparaging about him. After all, they are followers of the twenty-first century’s most evil human being.
Why are they this way? That question demands a many-faceted answer. Different MAGA voters have differing reasons for following Trump. But their most common trait is a lack of empathy. MAGA voters have a very hard time relating to or caring about the pain and suffering of anybody but themselves.
Elon Musk, who is so stupid he frequently volunteers stupid statements that later can be used against him, recently told Joe Rogan that, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Hannah Arendt, the great German philosopher and historian disagrees. “The death of human empathy,” she wrote, “is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
Arendt is also author of the book, “The Banality of Evil,” in which she contends that not every follower of Hitler was an unregenerate sociopath, but average, mundane people who prefer simplistic defenses to critical thinking. But in order to arrive at such slapdash philosophies, many of them lack, or at least are deficient in, empathy.
An absence of empathy was a feature of Hitler and his top Nazis, much as it is in Trump’s cabinet, advisors and staff. It is practically a truism that dictatorships will not tolerate empathy. Rare exceptions might be the reigns of Caesar Augustus and Napoleon, regimes responsible for brutalities to be sure, but also occasional wisdom tempered by empathy.
But with fascists, all bets are off. Absence of empathy isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist at the Nuremberg Trials put it this way: “In my work with the defendants I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
The Trump “administration” is a monument to hurting people. Ninety percent of their output, statements and posts to social media contain something hostile to someone with an intent to harm, take revenge on or kilo them. That is no accident. Their lack of empathy is showing.
Curiously, people who lack empathy often have an exaggerated regard for themselves and their own well-being. That is why Republicans whine so much when they don’t get absolutely everything their own way.
That is our secret weapon. When the MAGA rank and file begin to see that not only is Donald Trump not their friend, he’s going to make their lives more difficult, possibly unbearable, there will be a scream of surprise and betrayal that will be heard around the world.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.