LIVING ROOM CONVERSATION: The Power of Empathy for Democracy and Why MAGA Tries to Shut It Down

January 5, 2026

Dear Friends:

This weekend’s news was alarming. Yet again we are made a shocked audience to the ruination of national and international order, by the president of our own country. Has it begun to feel like, to coin a phrase, just one spectacle of violence and lawlessness after another, cycling us through a series of emotions that both inflame and deplete us, ad infinitum?

If so, that's by design: authoritarian politics thrives on shock, fear, and disorientation, crashing against our ethical sensibility, one moral injury after another. To cope with this "flood the zone" strategy, we must both heal and defend ourselves not only in order to do our work, but to show us how we do our work. That is an important reason for us to focus at our next meeting on cultivating a pro-social emotion: empathy. 

Beyond the benefit that we each can gain, there is also tactical value in considering empathy: MAGA has spent a notable amount of energy arguing against it, suggesting that there is something of value there for dismantling that ideology. Empathy may give us an advantage in how we reach out to people who are becoming disillusioned and drifting away from the cult of personality, as we discussed at our December meeting through the example of Marjorie Taylor Greene. 

We will not all agree all the time. Being able to at least hear and understand each other is part of how we rebuild civic strength, democratic grounding, and clarity of purpose. All of that is necessary if we are to resist lawlessness and regain the capacity to hold the powerful accountable.

Please join Town Square Democracy for our conversation.