Americans Don’t Lack Empathy. We Are Being Drained of It.
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I have been thinking a good deal about invisibility these days, particularly as I've noticed the many ways Trumpworld has tried to render others as irrelevant or ghosts. Whether you are of the leopards-ate-their-faces schadenfreude camp or the we're-gonna-need-a-bigger-tent camp, one animating hope of the Trump opposition has been that as disaffected voters begin to experience personal suffering, they will also experience a reckoning that will turn them away from the current president. The idea is that, as Trump voters start to witness firsthand pain , whether through individual financial hardship , price hikes , and scarcity as a result of the Trump tariffs; through the costs , hardships , and loss of governmental services as storms and climate change hit; or through government cuts to SNAP , Medicaid , veterans benefits , cancer research , and vaccines that finally come for their loved ones, they will claw their collective way back to a general regard for stability, empathy, governance, democracy, and even the rule of law.
This wait-it-out theory has been a cornerstone of many Democrats' strategic planning for the midterms . Unfortunately, it relies on the wrongheaded notion that there is some knowable quantum of personal suffering that leads us all back to a moment of either tactical, rational self-interest or (even better!) the slow rebirth of compassion and care for others. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it is not always—perhaps not even often—borne out in practice. As Robert Kuttner has argued , there is at least some subset of Trump voters who affirmatively reveal in the suffering of the other so long as the other is suffering more than they are , no matter how great or how solvable their suffering is. There is also the unquantifiable but, I believe, vitally important American “luckiness” vibe, which makes some of us believe that even while others are struggling, those we love will escape problems as a result of personal merit, or—as things worsen—that we can indeed find a way to bargain with the dictator that will save our own skin . This is the American dream metabolized into personal belief systems: It will never come for me because this is still the freest land on Earth, so the systems as they pertain to me will all hold.
But the largest error that lies in the hope that people will eventually come around to feeling compassion for the suffering of the “other”—the refugee and the migrant and the trans kid and the woman with an ectopic pregnancy—is that it ignores that we are being trained every day in the opposite direction: We are being conditioned to unsee even those people for whom we felt some kinship a mother eight years ago. So recently that we marched for deracialized policing and we organized to protect reproductive freedom and we celebrated marriage equality. These days, we might fight the continued encroachment of autocracy, but we haven't fully reckoned with the fact that among Trump's unique superpowers is the invisibling of the great array of people who used to make America special.
The ways in which the other is deliberately erased from public consciousness has been studied and chronicled by experts in authoritarianism for decades. From Hannah Arendt's work on the purposeful manipulations of loneliness and fear to the deliberate deployment of language that dehumanizes marginalized minorities , as well as the use of misinformation to shape public narratives, the playbook used by most successful autocrats to make us fear vulnerable groups is well known. It is readily adopted and scaled, but Trump and MAGA have rolled out a series of schemes that allow us to disappear the other so swiftly and so completely that it's almost imperceptible to the naked eye.
Sometimes, the Trump team attempts to make real people invisible by painting them as smaller than they are. In March, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison, where hundreds of Venezuelan migrants were surrendered without due process, she made certain to have herself photographed in front of a great mass of shirtless men , centering herself like a supermodel surrounded by big cats in a photo shoot . The systemic anonymizing and blurring of anyone accused without proof of being a gang leader and terrorist is one way to make them unworthy of our concern. At the same time, Trump and his Cabinet are equally deft at singling out any one alleged outsider and portraying them as larger-than-life and monstrous. The claim by Stephen Miller that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a known gang member and sex trafficker is an example of this play, as is the use of allegedly photoshopped images of his knuckles to suggest that he is the leader of a violent criminal gang.
The effect of painting this Maryland man raising three children with his US citizen wife as simultaneously fungible among a mass of faceless “terrorists” and terrifyingly dangerous as a gang leader (despite not a scintilla of proof of criminal behavior) quickly becomes a test of citizen numbness. It also becomes an inoculation against future awakening to empathy: If the White House can invisible Abrego Garcia, and arrest a sitting judge and a member of Congress , it can surely— as the poem goes —come for the next group soon enough too. As the would-be authoritarian keeps ratcheting up the class of faceless “enemies,” it becomes vitally important to keep ratcheting up the dehumanization and degradation of these supposed enemies too. The objective here isn't just to foster a sense of public apathy toward the other. It's to watch it harden and calcify in real time. As the Atlantic's Nick Miroff has reported , the Trump administration went from admitting that Garcia had been removed in error, and from struggling to bring him home, to hardening his position that he was a well-known established criminal, largely as a means of assessing whether the courts would be able to restrain the executive on deportation cases. But this also serves as a way to test whether the public outrage fired up in March and expressed in April about this lawless kidnapping would sputter out by May.
This is how invisibility operates: Things that scandalized us four months ago fail to penetrate today. Mass layoffs of government workers that shocked and upset us in February are met with stoic silence today, as the workers ask each other why nobody cares . Americans who were out of their minds when Roe v. Wade was overturned seem to quietly internalize the fact that the state of Georgia is keeping Adriana Smith , a 30-year-old brain-dead woman, alive so she can serve as an incubator for her fetus. It's not that most of us are actually lacking in compassion or empathy; it's simply that a central engine of authoritarianism deliberately requires you to have an ever-diminishing sphere of concern. The more you worry about feeding your family and keeping your job and sending your kid to a functioning college, the less space you will have to worry about people who still seemed like real people just last year. In a way, JD Vance's cynical reading of religious doctrine —we look out for our own first and foremost, and the vulnerable get the scraps—maps fully onto this worldview, creating a permission structure to recognize the humanity of an ever-diminishing class of people in your orbit as you numb yourself out to those who reside outside it.
There is no blame to be allocated for human beings' tendency to succumb to this phenomenon. Our exhausted brains and hearts cannot hold infinite suffering, and it is the objective of authoritarians everywhere to cause infinite suffering, in the hope that it will extinguish citizens' desire to fight back. It's one of the reasons those who fight autocracy remind us to seek and find connectivity with strangers, reach out to folks in other countries, to force ourselves into community with people who challenge our preconceived ideas. Retraining ourselves to see everyone—even the people we don't know, or haven't yet met, or to whom we cannot feel any immediate intuitive association—as human and worthy is some of the most essential resistance work we can undertake. Reducing any living being to an NPC (nonplayer character) is the well-trodden methodology of fascists and sociopaths. But it is not an irreversible condition. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem can strip men naked and shave their heads, but they can't make us not see. Only we can do that.
The invisibling of the other is, at bottom, just another authoritarian party trick that allows us all to accept some tolerable level of mass renditions, or school defundings, or arrests of public officials, or presidential pardons. It is not so much that most Americans are without basic empathy, but rather that we are being forced to ration it, and to serve ourselves first. Whether that effort can be reversed in time for the midterms or the 2028 elections is not really the demanding question. The weirdly urgent task lies in asking ourselves whether we have become unwitting accomplished in the imperceptible attempts to make some people unseeable, and why we might be willing to accept that. That isn't the work of political parties or messaging or even of leopards or faces. It's something to which we are all susceptible, and against which we all must be on guard.
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