Why empathy matters in politics | thearticle

At the Democratic Convention the Democrats are hammering home one theme, in particular: Joe’s Biden’s empathy. He’s a people person who cares for the ordinary man and woman, the ticket

collector on his commuter train, the woman who operated an elevator who said “that he actually cared”. The Democrats rightly think it’s a good card to play against Trump, a pathological

narcissist who doesn’t seem to care for anyone else. There have been a number of recent moments in British politics when empathy, or the lack of it, has really mattered. Theresa May never

recovered from her reaction to Grenfell. Hence the _Maybot_, the sense that she lacked the fundamental ability to empathise with those who were suffering. More recently, Cressida Dick

announced that the Met was closing its investigation into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence after 27 years. Scotland Yard chief Cressida Dick was moving the case to an “inactive phase”,

to quote her unfortunate phrase. This was a low point in the history of the Met and of Cressida Dick’s time in charge. How could she say such a thing? How could she possibly think it was the

right thing to do? What Cressida Dick should have said was that the murder of Stephen Lawrence will haunt her and every member of the Met and that she would never rest until the other

murderers were behind bars. She should have said she would continue to pursue the case because she understands what Stephen’s parents continue to go through and what all parents of victims

of racial violence go through every day and that it is her job to stand by the victims of such terrible crimes until justice is done. Not long before, she failed to capture the mood in

Middle England in response to the damage caused to the statue of Churchill and to the Cenotaph during Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Many people were appalled by this vandalism. She just

didn’t get it and couldn’t communicate a sense of outrage which matched theirs — she couldn’t say that she understood exactly how they felt. This is a hugely important part of public life.

Clinton and Blair were masters of it. When Princess Diana died, perhaps his most famous moment as Prime Minister, Blair seemed to speak from the heart, albeit a well-scripted heart. In the

past week, the A-Level crisis was all about Gavin Williamson. The debate seemed to be about his incompetence, but it was also about his inability to show that he cared for these young people

who were so distraught. On the one hand, you had eighteen-year-olds weeping and saying their lives had bene destroyed, and on the other you had someone talking about algorithms. That word

will haunt Williamson for the rest of his career. Of course, examiners need to find a way of calculating A-Level grades when students haven’t been able to sit exams, but the great

politicians would never have spoken about algorithms and allowed themselves to be seen as out of touch technocrats. They would have been filmed hugging distraught Sixth Formers and showing

how much they cared. These days, apologies are not enough. You have to be seen to care, unless you are Donald Trump in which case you throw away the rule book and show that you don’t care at

all: not about immigrants and their weeping children, not about war heroes and their families, or about the 170,000 Americans who have died from Coronavirus under his watch, not about the

small businesses that have gone under all across America, or black families shaken to their core by the killing of George Floyd. William James famously wrote of “The Tough and the Tender”.

He was making a philosophical point. But it’s a good phrase for summing up what’s happened to politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The Tough preach the virtues of austerity, attack the

growing tide of immigration, call for more robust policing, including stop and search, insist something must be done about grade inflation. The Tender weep over Diana, hug a hoody, talk

about human rights from Grenfell to Windrush, and say something must be done when Sixth Formers say their lives are devastated. The Tough suspect that empathy is just a fancy word for

sentimentality. And there is no doubt that British culture has taken a turn towards the sentimental. Perhaps Diana’s death was the key turning-point. It is surely no coincidence that it

followed so soon after Blair’s election. These two moments introduced a new kind of emotionalism into British public life and those who couldn’t grasp it, the Queen at that moment, Theresa

May and Gavin Williamson more recently, pay a big price. Of course, we want presidents and ministers who feel for ordinary people, whose lives have been devastated by years of Thatcherism

and Reaganism, the closure of mines, steelworks and shipyards, and then by years of austerity. We want a president who will talk to lift operators and ticket collectors, a Prime Minister who

will be filmed with bakers and fishmongers. This is the challenge that will face politicians and all people in public life for years to come. Can you mix a grasp of policy with the ability

to show emotion, whether or not you feel it? If you can’t, modern politics may not be for you.