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empathy
Americans Shouldn't Take Democracy for Granted—It Erodes Faster than We Think
There is cause for serious concern about the future of US democracy, as exclusionary rhetoric and practices contribute to political instability.
Apr 27, 2026
It takes decades to build institutions and the norms and values that keep them working, but far less time to destroy them.
Less than two years into the second Trump administration, the United States finds itself in an undeclared war with Iran, while at home, efforts to undermine institutions like the Justice Department and the legitimacy of elections continue to grow, alongside the threat of Christian nationalism, an ideology that weakens democracy by narrowing the definition of who belongs. At the same time, immigration enforcement has been at the forefront of normalizing the repressive use of state power, with two US citizens killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and deaths in ICE custody reaching their highest levels in two decades. There is cause for serious concern about the future of US democracy, as exclusionary rhetoric and practices contribute to political instability.
I grew up in a politically unstable system. In just a few years at the end of the 1990s, Ecuador went through five presidents, a civilian-military uprising, a banking collapse, rising inflation, and widespread social unrest. When I first came to the United States as an exchange student, I didn’t understand the importance of “institutional legitimacy,” the idea that an institution is rightful, appropriate, and deserving of trust or respect. In my home country, no such legitimacy existed—and the consequences were dire.
Now, I see Americans’ confidence in institutions—particularly those meant to protect the public and uphold justice, such as the Justice Department and the police—being weakened in real time. At the same time, President Donald Trump continues to delegitimize the entire US electoral system by promoting his (baseless) claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Because of this misinformation, the majority of Republicans believe this to be the case (62%), compared with 31% of all Americans, according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), where I am the director of research.
As we move through this election season and approach the nation’s 250th anniversary, it is worth reflecting on how diversity, trust, tolerance, respect, honesty, and empathy are hallmarks of the American democratic ideal.
It is deeply troubling to see continued messaging from the president that risks undermining confidence in the integrity of midterm elections, instilling widespread fear around voting, and advancing immigration rhetoric and policies that demonize vulnerable minorities and limit their rights. Freedom House, an organization that monitors democracy levels worldwide, reports that over the past decade, US democracy has declined from 92 (out of 100) to 81 in 2025, reflecting a gradual erosion in key democratic indicators, particularly in the protection of minority rights.
Despite recent changes in the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership, the Trump administration has continued to pursue its aggressive immigration agenda, conflating undocumented immigrants with violent criminal convictions, and, most recently, with Trump’s push for the Supreme Court to uphold his executive order ending birthright citizenship.
Diversity strengthens democracies by bringing different perspectives to decision-making. It also cultivates empathy by exposing individuals to experiences beyond their own and encouraging tolerance and mutual respect. By contrast, autocracies favor conformity, distrust, the concentration of power, intimidation of critics, and targeting of minorities, like immigrants.
Most, but not all, Americans disagree with the Trump administration’s divisive, dehumanizing policies. PRRI’s recent survey shows solid majorities of Republicans (61%) and Christian nationalism adherents (57%) favor “allowing ICE officers to arrest and relocate undocumented immigrants to detention centers in states far from their home without allowing them to challenge their detainment in court.” They also favor “allowing ICE officers to regularly conduct surveillance and arrests at sensitive locations like schools, hospitals, places of worship, and social service locations” (54% and 53%), suggesting a willingness among these groups to expand state power at the expense of due process and civil liberties.
In addition, a growing movement is challenging traditional understandings of empathy. Data from PRRI finds that while most Americans agree more with the idea that “empathy is a moral value that is the foundation of a healthy society” (80%) than that it is “a dangerous emotion that undermines our ability to set up a society that is guided by God’s truth (16%),” a quarter of Republicans (25%) and nearly 4 in 10 Christian nationalism adherents (37%) agree that empathy is dangerous.
I find myself asking: At what point did we lose sight of the democratic principles we used to uphold? What happened to our commitment to human rights, the fight against corruption, limits on the unchecked use of power, and, simply put, the truth? When did we stop caring about other human beings?
As we move through this election season and approach the nation’s 250th anniversary, it is worth reflecting on how diversity, trust, tolerance, respect, honesty, and empathy are hallmarks of the American democratic ideal. What is happening across the country and abroad should serve as a wake-up call about our commitment to democratic institutions and values, compelling us to come together to repair the damage.
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The 'Empathy Deficit' of the Powerful
What is commonly thought of as power—power over others, aka, dominance—isn’t power at all. It’s an illusion of power that weakens, and perhaps destroys, those who hold it.
Apr 26, 2026
I’m trying to return to the book I started writing a decade ago, and doing so has pulled my awareness of and relationship to the events of 2026 into the larger consciousness the book is struggling to address: What is power?
Can we broaden and expand this word? Can we merge it with collective awareness—you know, the idea of working together? Can we expand our awareness beyond the sense of dominance: power with, rather than power over? Yes, power with, in the “love thy enemy” sense, but without the cynicism and ignorance that usually accompany the word “love."
When we think of power, as I discuss in the book, the word itself commands that we carve the concept into something isolated and wieldable: a sword, a gun, a scepter. Power means power over. There is no basic concept of power—seemingly no word for power in the English language—that also means collaboration, collective participation: people working together, individually empowered at the same time that the larger whole is empowered.
Even when we examine the dark side of power—as in, power corrupts—the examination seems to hover as a warning rather than open up to larger awareness. Consider, for instance, this 2017 article in The Atlantic by Jerry Useem, titled (fasten your seatbelts!) “Power Causes Brain Damage,” which discusses a concept he calls “hubris syndrome.” The essential point the article makes is that people who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with—or mime, as the article puts it—people in general, the lesser mortals who must follow the boss’ orders. Why am I suddenly thinking of Donald Trump, the world’s “Power Jesus”?
Let’s break the automatic linguistic link right now between power and dominance. True power enlarges the whole; it doesn’t isolate.
This inability to express or feel empathy, it turns out, is serious. It isolates the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions. (Right, Donald?). And hubris syndrome isn’t merely psychological; it’s also physiological.
Citing neuroscience research, Useem writes:
And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, ‘mirroring,’ that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what (psychologist Dacher) Keltner has termed the ‘power paradox’: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.
Useem quotes authors David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, who define hubris syndrome as “a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features, he adds, include: “manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence.”
The idea is that we’re naturally connected and subconsciously “mimic” others: We laugh when others laugh, tense up when others grow tense. It’s not faking an emotion to fit in; it’s participating in, feeling, the collective emotion that fills the room. “It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from,” Useem writes. But: Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” leading to what the psychologist calls an “empathy deficit,” which saps the powerful of most, or maybe all, of their social skill, leaving them, even as they generate endless obeisance, socially isolated souls.
The conclusion to be drawn here is that what is commonly thought of as power—power over others, aka, dominance—isn’t power at all. It’s an illusion of power that weakens, and perhaps destroys, those who hold it. Consider the rise and fall of dictators, the toppling of empires, the comeuppance of kings and queens. Let them eat cake.
The article does an excellent job pointing all this out, but at a certain point it falls into a linguistic trap. Useem writes despairingly: “This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?”
My answer is this: Knowledge in all its basic innocence is, indeed, power, but rarely is this “power over” someone. Knowledge of how to walk, how to read... this is a child claiming her life. And the entire family is empowered. As the child learns how to function independently, Mom and Dad learn how to parent. Yes, knowledge—power—can be used to further the interests of our darkest impulses. We can use what we learn to blackmail, extort, cheat, bully, win, etc., etc. But let’s break the automatic linguistic link right now between power and dominance. True power enlarges the whole; it doesn’t isolate. As the child learns to function, the family grows.
Yes, the power of self-defense is sometimes necessary, at the individual and, yes, the national level. And power can enable us to win, whether a game or a fight. Hurray! But the point my unfinished book is trying to make is that such power exists in a larger context, just as we exist in a larger context—and this context is ever opening and expanding before us. The US relationship to the rest of the world is larger than Donald Trump’s, or any president’s, ego. It’s larger than our military.
Rather, every last one of us, from newborns to geezers, is a participant in creating who we are, and who we are becoming. Perhaps no one says it better than Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being."
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Time to Grow Out of 'Playing' War
By saying the quiet part out loud, Trump is revealing that war is based on the least of who we are, the least mature aspect of human nature.
Mar 14, 2026
Boys will be boys. Just ask the president.
At a gathering of Republicans a few days ago, Donald Trump talked nonchalantly about the recent sinking of an apparently unarmed Iranian frigate by the US Navy—in the Indian Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from the Persian Gulf. A total of 104 crew members were killed and 32 more were injured.
The president proceeded to make this more than merely another brutal, pointless act of war. He turned it into a glaring—shocking—revelation of truth... about the American-Israeli war on Iran and, quite possibly about all wars: about war itself. He was upset at first, he told the crowd, that the Navy sank the frigate rather than capturing it. But when he expressed this to the military officials, one of them responded, “It’s more fun to sink them.”
And the crowd laughed. Uh... are we “playing” war or waging it, with that trillion-dollar annual military budget America has? No doubt we’re doing both, but normally the “fun” part of war—the dehumanization of the enemy, the abstraction of people’s deaths (including those of children)—is airbrushed from public discussion by politically correct strategic and political blather. But this is Trump, spouting the quiet part out loud—in the process, causing the global infrastructure of nation-states, borders, and militarism to tremble. Could it be that war is based on the least of who we are, the least mature aspect of human nature?
A “global structure of nonviolence” is emerging—pushing, pushing against the deeply embedded infrastructure of war and us-vs.-them consciousness.
In contrast, I quote from a recent essay written by my friend Laura Hassler, founder and director of Musicians Without Borders:
Well, guess what. There are other forces alive in today’s world. Decades of resistance to domination and colonialism, the learnings of movements across the Global South, the freedom that Western hegemony for a few decades inadvertently released on its majority population, and access through social media to some of the reality of the actual horrors perpetrated in our names have together led to a worldwide awakening to fundamental injustices, and a worldwide longing for a livable, connected, survivable future.
She calls this worldwide awakening “Radical Empathy,” a term in widespread use, which means a deeply rooted sense of connection among people, well beyond merely sympathy and shared feelings. We are one planet, one people, and we will survive together or not at all.
“Radical Empathy must be fierce, stubborn, creative, persistent,” she continues. “We must hold on to each other, build community, be willing to take risks and accept consequences. Seek alternatives. Stand in solidarity with all who resist oppression and the violence of power and greed...
“And we artists must nurture artistic bravery, using the power of the arts to tell truth, to build community, to turn our capacity for radical empathy into a force for good.”
In other words, Radical Empathy isn’t simply emotional. You can say it’s spiritual, but it’s also political. It’s a movement: ever changing, ever manifesting in the moment, ever addressing conflict by reaching for connection and understanding. Yes, global nationalism still maintains the power to wage war. And war is everywhere these days. As Jeffrey Sachs noted in a recent interview, “World War III is here...” from Ukraine and Gaza and Iran to Asia to the Western Hemisphere. And the fighting across the world is linked.
But at the same time the world is changing. A “global structure of nonviolence” is emerging—pushing, pushing against the deeply embedded infrastructure of war and us-vs.-them consciousness. Finding understanding with your enemy—connecting with “the other”—can be incredibly difficult, especially in the midst of conflict, but Radical Empathy is making it a reality across the planet.
Laura Hassler’s organization, Musicians Without Borders, exemplifies this movement. The organization was founded in 1999, in Alkamaar, a city in the Netherlands. Laura, who was a choir director and organized music events, had put together a concert for the town’s annual honoring of the dead of World War II.
But as I wrote in a column several years ago:
The bloody war in Kosovo was then raging: Thousands had died; nearly a million refugees were streaming across Europe. Its horror dominated the daily news, and Laura couldn’t ignore it. She couldn’t simply focus on the war dead of half a century ago, not when the hell of war was alive in the present moment, pulling at her soul.
She decided, "We’ll perform music from the people suffering from war now—folk songs from Eastern Europe," she told me. Her impulse was to reach out, to connect, somehow, with those suffering right now, on the other side of Europe. And something happened the night of the concert. When it ended, there was a moment of profound silence... and then, as the audience stood, applause so thunderous that the rafters shook. It went on for 20 minutes.
One of the musicians, a political refugee from Turkey, said to her afterwards: "This concert was special. We should put it on a train, send it to Kosovo and stop the war!”
And they went to Kosovo. Gradually, Musicians Without Borders became global, working with local people in war-torn regions all over the world—people on both sides of the divide—to create music that transcends the war of the moment. The organization currently has long-term projects in the Balkans, West Asia, Eastern Africa, and Europe.
This is Radical Empathy, or at least one example of it—our complex force of hope even as the world’s leaders continue bleeding away the planet’s resources in order to play war. Radical Empathy transcends war. It’s who we are—when we find ourselves.
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