How The Empathy Gap Swallowed America
When politicians stop intuiting human inclinations, they become dangerously prone to alienating the public.
The writer Yonatan Touval has written the best analysis I’ve read of how Donald Trump blundered into cataclysm by launching an illegal war of choice against Iran.
Touval is based in Tel Aviv; his critique is of all of the war’s architects, including Benjamin Netanyahu. But I’m most keenly interested in Trump’s role.
Touval fleshes out at length what I tried to capture here, about how Trump’s predatory temperament and antipathy make him a bad fighter. If you’re unable to contemplate humans as complex creatures with interior lives, passions, and honor systems, if you see them as mere pawns or binary instruments—useful vs. not useful—they will beat you in a war, because you will routinely misjudge how they’ll respond to provocation.
I want to extend this analysis to other kinds of politics. Because it also helps explain multiple dynamics unfolding in America under Donald Trump: Between the United States and other countries. Within the United States under the Trump regime. And among Democrats, some of whom make a similar mistake in failing to think of constituents as humans rather than collections of ones and zeroes.
This empathy deficit—whether it stems as in Trump’s case from contempt, or as in Democrats’ case from the desire to reduce politics to statistical probabilities—is endemic. An inability to capture the loyalty of skeptics or redirect their ire by understanding what inspires, soothes, scares, and repulses human beings explains Trump's military failures. It also explains his domestic political failures, the broader authoritarian turn in Republican politics, and even certain technocratic tendencies among Democrats. Whenever leaders treat civilians principally as instruments, they misjudge how those people will respond to events and appeals and affronts. This, unsurprisingly, makes it hard to win any contest in which the masses have a say. Wars, yes. But elections, too.
The central insight in Touval’s essay is that might is no substitute for contingency planning, which in turn requires a keen understanding of human instinct. Weapons and surveillance technology can even become crutches that atrophy these other strategic muscles.
A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning—they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.
This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war is about.
I believe this insight applies much more widely than to war. It applies to all people who wield more power than they can responsibly handle; it also applies to people who rely excessively on advanced tools (of theory and modeling) to construct their politics, or anticipate the consequences of various moves on the political game board.
There’s no substitute for empathy—not in the doting sense of the term, but in the ability to perceptively inhabit other people’s psyches, and thus imagine what various stimuli will feel like to them.
Trump can only imagine people as marks and subordinates. He seeks to extract from them and punish them if they resist. He imagines all human relations as between the dominant and oppressed, and thus defaults to acts of oppression, imagining weaker people will choose to be subdued rather than risk greater losses by standing up for themselves.
It is the miscalculation that drove his flagging approval ratings into the danger zone, and drove his secret police operation out of Minneapolis deeper into the hinterlands of Minnesota. The miscalculation that made him think extorting and threatening our allies would strengthen, rather than weaken his hand. The miscalculation that made him imagine regime change in Iran was a matter of a weekend bombing campaign.
Tyranny is foolhardy politics. But it is an approach that appeals to Republicans, because they’ve come to believe that dominance of others—minority rule—is the only way to make the United States conform to right-wing ideas about how society should be ordered.
What is The Good Life? Different people will say different things. But Republicans are much more likely to answer patriarchally.