Empathy, Cities, and the Future of American Politics

Empathy, Cities, and the Future of American Politics.

We live today in an era of great divisiveness. Although most developed nations seem to be experiencing growing social divisions, the scale of political divisiveness is particularly severe in the U.S., especially in the sphere of national politics.

For the first time in cultural memory, U.S. voters deliberately elected a President who actively champions social divisions. He shamelessly asserts to represent only his political supporters. All policy positions are reduced to personal affronts. For example, Trump reduced the hundreds of policy choices in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed on July 3^rd by describing it on personal terms during a speech that evening in Iowa.

“And I gotta tell you, I wanna thank Republican congressmen and women because what they did is incredible last night. And the Senate, we got, not with all of the things we did with the tax cuts and rebuilding our military, not one Democrat voted for us. And I think we use it in the campaign that’s coming up, the midterms, because we gotta beat ‘em. But all of the, all of the things that we’ve given, and they wouldn’t vote, only because they hate Trump. But I hate them too. You know that. So, its’s sort of, I hate, I really do. I hate them, I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country.”^[i]

Even within the boundaries of his own Republican Party, the President forces divisions. All those who disagree with him on any issue, large or small, are branded RINOs (Republican in name only). He repeatedly refers to RINOs as “the lowest form of human life,” even lower than all others who oppose him

Politics in the U.S. has always been divisive. Sharp policy differences between political parties have always defined different eras and sharp disputes have always divided prominent political egos.

Yet it was James Monroe, the last President who had direct military service during the Revolutionary War, who positioned the U.S. Presidency as the ultimate symbol of national unity rather than the triumphant winner of a divisive, partisan electoral process.

Monroe put on his old Revolutionary War uniform, pulled his white hair back into an old-fashioned bun reminiscent of George Washington, and conducted the first known national listening tour from 1817 to 1819. His strategy kicked off what historians call an “Era of Good Feelings” in national politics.

Monroe’s efforts successfully calmed the first strong threats of national disunion that arose after the War of 1812 and the growing struggle about Federal versus state authority within the Constitution. Elections continued to be divisive events, but Monroe established the expectation that each president would find ways to position himself as a voice for unity rather than acting as a partisan victor.

Today’s divisions may not be inherently worse than those of previous eras. Yet voters in 2024 chose Trump’s divisive behavior as part of a more general rejection of the status quo position of the Federal government as a source of stability in American life. Trump’s entire political career is based on encouraging divisions, not unity.

Only time will tell if voters really approve the scale of divisiveness and disruption that Trump’s first six months have fostered. Yet the president’s voters can’t claim they did not know what he intended to do.

The major provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act include items President Trump stressed during his campaign. The provisions include: the huge tax cuts for wealthy families; the dramatic escalation in deportations; the $1 trillion+ cuts in health care and food support for poor people (despite the claims that all cuts represent fraud, waste, and abuse); the virtual elimination of “soft power” foreign aid; the radical increase in direct presidential control over the Federal bureaucracy; and the continual vilification of all those who oppose his priorities.

Many analysts and social commentators try to connect the disparate elements of the Trump agenda to find a coherent whole. One common element they find is the complete lack of empathy for those who have previously relied on the Federal government for uplift and improvement. President Trump’s agenda, they assert, taps into the widespread decline in empathy within American culture.

Empathy is defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. It differs from sympathy, which is the ability to feel sorry for someone. Empathy is a much deeper emotion since it requires one to internalize the emotions felt by others. One can be sympathetic from a safe distance. Empathy requires emotional engagement with the problems of other people. It comes with some commitment to act to remedy perceived causes of pain.

Yet why do Americans feel less empathy for their neighbors who struggle to succeed, including fellow citizens and those who lack the proper documents? And why does that lack of empathy expand to people beyond our borders to include the world’s poorest and sickest people in the developing world?

One reason empathy has declined, I believe, is an unexpected consequence of our rapid growth in affluence over the last three decades. Social scientists have long argued that more affluence decreases empathy. Perhaps the extraordinary increase in affluence among tens of millions of diverse American households over the past 40 years has derailed our previously shared goal of using the Federal government to reduce clear-cut inequities in American life?

Perhaps it’s easier to advocate for the “have-nots” when most residents can be grouped into that category. But in today’s economy, the argument asserts, the distribution of affluence has shifted. The Swedish economist Daniel Waldenstrom, for example, argues in his 2024 book^[ii] that a proper assessment of economic history over the last several decades reveals widespread increases in household wealth and a sharp decline in inequality. This pattern is found in the U.S. as well as most wealthy European nations.

These remarkable achievements, Waldenstrom argues, are too often ignored. More attention goes to three highly visible, albeit less proportionally important, trends: the rise of a new class of self-aggrandizing tech billionaires; the downwardly mobile working class; and persistently poor inner-city residents.

The bigger story, however, is that since the 1990s tens of millions of previously insecure households have climbed out of poverty to join the largest wave of upward economic mobility the world has ever experienced.

Their affluence is driven by the rising value of two types of assets, each of which has risen in value because of deliberately persistent Federal policies. They own their own homes, and they have pension funds. Both asset classes have surged upwards in value over the last four decades, despite periods of short-term financial crisis.

A large portion of these upwardly mobile households, however, attribute their success to their own individual agency more than anything else. The Federal policies that have facilitated home ownership and private pensions have been so constant they have disappeared into the background. The benefactors of those policies, therefore, have less empathy for those who remain behind as they have prospered. After all, “we did it, they can too.”

Furthermore, many of the newly affluent households have adopted the idea that the cultural barriers of gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and/or immigration status that once constrained themselves no longer constrain their peers who have not yet begun to prosper.

So, if empathy has been reduced by unprecedented, but not yet universal, upward mobility, how do we go about rebuilding it in American culture? How do we increase the value of empathy in American politics?

History suggests that widespread economic decline would likely increase empathy, since millions of non-empathetic people would experience personal crises and instability. That would repeat the experiences of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Some analysts point to the looming crisis in white collar work that may erupt from the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) as a source of that scale of economic disruption. Others argue that the growing U.S. national debt could be another source of economic disaster.

But there must be a set of solutions that would be less catastrophic than these.

An important factor that may help increase empathy was discussed by my Roman Catholic parish priest two weeks ago in his weekly sermon. Father Tom Fanta addressed the issue of how people can cope with the visible cruelty that is part of the wave of new immigration enforcement sweeping across the country, and the large cuts in funding that have been approved for health care and food assistance.

Father Tom urged people to remember one fundamental truth, that most people are good. Most people just want to go about their own lives in peace, and they want their neighbors to have that same opportunity. Most people do not define their own happiness by denying happiness to others.

That simple truth is a wellspring for endless amounts of empathy. It helps overcome social divisiveness by emphasizing the humanity in people regardless of who urges us to divide them into stereotypical groups.

Indeed, the concept of empathy lies at the heart of every major organized religion in the world, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sikhism, Judaism, and others. Despite the obvious reality that religious differences are too often used to emphasize divisions among different adherents, the core teachings within each major faith tradition clearly emphasize the value of empathy.

Empathy also plays a central role in almost every non-religious secular tradition of philosophy and/or human ethics. These include humanism, utilitarianism, existentialism, stoicism, phenomenology, and even neuroscientific ethics.

Stimulating more empathy in American life is part of coping with today’s political dynamics. American culture is perhaps the world’s greatest mixture of different faith traditions and different non-religious philosophical systems that create structures for creating civic ethics based on empathy. Cities are where all the most diverse elements of American culture interact most directly every day. Consequently, cities need to play important roles in any strategy to stimulate more empathy.

City politics is defined by finding paths towards unity. Mayors, city councils, city managers, business groups, philanthropies, neighborhood groups, organized religious groups, labor groups, human service agencies, and other factions within each city’s dynamic political culture generate empathy for each other’s problems and priorities. Cities exist because all factions accommodate each other continuously, although never perfectly. If not, cities would not function.

It is yet to be seen whether the U.S. Federal government can function in today’s world without a similar commitment to creating unity among different factions. President Monroe clearly didn’t think the young republic could survive long with a culture of divisiveness (at least among the limited segments that controlled American politics in that era).

If a new era of empathy is needed to spark a new era of greater unity in American life once the Trump administration leaves power in three years, perhaps the political dynamics within America’s great cities will become the inspiration for a new “Era of Better Feelings” in national politics.

Bob Gleeson

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^[i] Speech: Donald Trump Delivers a Salute to America, Speech in Des Moines, Iowa – July 3, 2025. Transcript created by Roll Call, at www.rollcall.com.

^[ii] Daniel Waldenstrom, Richer and More Equal: A New History of Wealth in the West (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2024).