Katha Pollitt is sick of hearing that liberals have to be less condescending toward Trump voters.
[H]ere’s my question: Who is telling the Tea Partiers and Trump voters to empathize with the rest of us? Why is it all one way? Hochschild’s subjects have plenty of demeaning preconceptions about liberals and blue-staters—that distant land of hippies, feminazis, and freeloaders of all kinds. Nor do they seem to have much interest in climbing the empathy wall. . .
Pollitt is responding to recent work by Michael Tomasky, Joan Williams, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and many unnamed others. Everyone she names is a liberal writing for the benefit of other liberals. They are offering advice to their fellows about how to win more elections without reconsidering their agendas. And they’re doing it because liberals don’t control the White House, the Congress, or most governorships and state legislatures.
I’m sure if I searched for it I could find op-eds urging Trump voters to have more empathy for other people — for example, empathy for illegal immigrants — on moral grounds. (Nobody is asking them to be less condescending. I don’t think even someone with Pollitt’s polemical gifts could build a column around the idea that red-state righties are just as condescending as blue-state progressives; hence the switch to discussing “empathy.”) But the reason there’s not a genre urging red staters to greater empathy for political profit seems obvious enough.