Slate Senior Writer Christina Cauterucci says the right is waging a "war on empathy," and the fatal shooting of Minneapolis mother Renee Good shows just how close they’ve come to winning.
“Among their base, today’s GOP is trying to drum out any natural impulses toward compassion, such that there is no imperative to feel — let alone express — any dismay at the killing of an ideological adversary. If Good wasn’t on Trump’s side, the party line goes, she got what was coming to her,” said Cauterucci. “The rush to defend Ross is more than a political move to justify Trump’s personal militia run amok. It’s another round in the right wing’s mounting war on empathy.”
Influential Christian conservatives have been proclaiming empathy as toxic and sinful, arguing that using caring for others as a means to sway righteous Americans toward liberal causes, such as eradicating racism or feeding the poor. It’s the argument that makes letting 500,000 children die worldwide more palatable, in addition to “Medicaid cuts, SNAP freezes, ICE raids, refugee bans, and forced childbirth.”
She also noted that Tesla and SpaceX CEO (and Trump donor) Elon Musk calls empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”
“In this worldview, anyone who poses a danger to those within the inner circles of human worthiness does not warrant much empathy. And it’s easy enough to argue that just about anyone is a threat to one’s family, town, or country, thus exempting them from our responsibilities of care,” said Cauterucci, who named examples such as “a drag queen” or “a liberal judge.” This, she said, could also apply to “someone wearing a Zohran Mamdani T-shirt at the grocery store” or, more recently, “a concerned Minnesotan who stopped to film the agents plucking people out of her community.”
“Once a person is no longer worthy of empathy, they become a justifiable casualty in service to any political aim,” Cauterucci argued. “There is no need to consider proportionality; killing someone for distracting ICE agents is just as defensible as ending a life on a battlefield. From the right’s perspective, Good’s political views made her fair game, so her gruesome, untimely death by the gun of a masked federal agent need not be met with outrage or remorse. Any empathy for her or her family imperils a greater project: cleansing Minneapolis of immigrants.”
From there, Cauterucci said there is a very short distance from “believing someone’s death is unworthy of mourning to believing they deserved to die.” And eventually to “inciting more death.”
“Every falsehood spun by Trump and his acolytes is an attempt to degrade their followers’ capacity for empathy past the point of flinching at an innocent woman’s death,” Cauterucci. “The goal is to diminish the ghastliness of Good’s death, and with it, the value of her life.”
Read Cauterucci's full slate column at this link (subscription required).