Chapter 13: The Empathy Deficit

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Chapter 13: The Empathy Deficit

Democracy’s Essential Ingredient

The social compact would dissolve, and justice be extirpated from
the earth, or have only a casual existence, were we callous to the
touches of affection. —Thomas Paine

In January, as another brutal Maine winter gripped the Northeast, Dwayne LaBrecque faced an impossible choice. The diabetic father of five, who’d lost several toes and part of his foot to infection, stared at his most recent heating bill with a growing dread. After losing his job as a shipping manager, Dwayne’s income had collapsed.1

For years, he’d relied on LIHEAP—the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program created by Congress in 1981—to keep his family warm through Maine’s harsh winters. But soon after his inauguration, Trump and congressional Republicans had put LIHEAP on the chopping block.

“If the president turned around and did away with that funding,” Dwayne told a local reporter, his voice breaking, “I have no idea how we’d survive the winter.”

His story isn’t at all unique. Across America, literally millions of families face similar crises every year, from heat to food to housing to medical and school bills, as the Trump administration dismantles the safety net that has protected vulnerable Americans for generations. But what strikes me most isn’t just the policy change; it’s the profound empathy deficit that enables it.

During my years rostered as a psychotherapist back in the 1980s, I learned that there’s a subset of humanity—roughly 1.5 to 4 percent of the general population—who lack the neurological or psychological ability to experience empathy. These individuals, often described clinically as sociopaths or psychopaths, process others’ pain in a purely intellectual way. They recognize suffering but feel little to nothing in response. No emotional twinge, no discomfort, no moral imperative to help.

While they represent a small fraction of the general population, they account for about one-third of our prison populations, commit roughly 90 percent of America’s violent crimes, and—most relevant to our current situation—are approximately 21 percent of all corporate CEOs.2 This last statistic helps explain how the American government, with big money from these CEOs following Lewis Powell’s infamous 1971 memo, has been transformed from an institution dedicated to the common good into something that increasingly resembles a corporate boardroom where human suffering is just an externality to be managed.

This mindset has now infected our entire system of government. It’s why Trump gleefully kept Kilmar Abrego Garcia in an El Salvadoran concentration camp even in defiance of a Supreme Court order to release him. It’s why he and his Project 2025 architects dismantled programs that helped vulnerable Americans without a twinge of conscience.3 It’s why his administration can watch climate disasters devastate communities while simultaneously rolling back environmental protections and gutting FEMA. This isn’t just partisan policy disagreement; it’s an empathy deficit elevated to governing philosophy.

This lack of empathy gets philosophical backing from figures like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, both favorites among Republicans and Libertarians who view compassion as weakness. Nietzsche famously called pity “a waste of feeling, a moral parasite which is injurious to the health,” while Rand built an entire philosophy around the “virtue of selfishness.” It’s no coincidence that billionaires like Elon Musk—who recently called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization”—find these ideas attractive. They provide intellectual cover for what is, at root, a profound moral failing.

Yet empathy isn’t a flaw; it’s the cornerstone of civilization itself. It’s the foundation upon which our democratic experiment was built. The Framers understood this, which is why both the preamble and Article I of our Constitution mention the “General Welfare.” Alexander Hamilton noted that “common interest may always be reckoned upon as the surest bond of sympathy.” Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both emphasized that government must serve more than just the powerful.

As I detailed in The Hidden History of American Democracy, concern for every community member is what led tribal people around the world to create largely egalitarian political structures throughout prehistory, structures on which we based our own Constitution. Margaret Mead noted this, pointing out how the evidence of healed bones was a surefire sign that prehistoric people didn’t leave their injured members to die but nurtured them back to health, even though the time and effort may have represented a risk to the tribe. Empathy built America and has guided our progress, in fits and starts but nonetheless generation by generation, toward a “more perfect union.”

When this essential quality of empathy vanishes from governance, democracy itself begins to collapse. A nation without empathy isn’t really a nation at all; it’s just a crime syndicate with a flag and army, a conspiracy to use the powers of government—the only institution that can legally deprive us of our freedom or even our lives—to elevate the powerful while crushing the weak. This ultimate expression of governmental sociopathy is called fascism, oligarchy, or authoritarianism. But whatever the label, the substance remains the same: rule by those who view human suffering as abstract and simply an acceptable price to be paid for wealth and power.

This is precisely what we’re witnessing now. As Trump implements Project 2025’s blueprint for dismantling the administrative state, each policy change reflects not just different priorities from America’s historic values, but a fundamentally different conception of what government itself is for. Instead of an institution that protects the vulnerable and promotes the general welfare, Trump views our government as a weapon to reward friends, punish enemies, and enrich the already wealthy, a machine of sorts for transforming public resources into private gain.

Dwayne LaBrecque feels this transformation most acutely. For him, LIHEAP wasn’t an abstract budget line; it was the difference between his family sleeping in warmth or shivering through another Maine winter. But in an administration where empathy is viewed as weakness, Dwayne’s suffering simply doesn’t matter.

Why It Matters

This is the deepest danger of Trump’s second term. Beyond specific policies, beyond institutional damage, he shows us what it looks like when sociopathy becomes a governing philosophy, a view of politics where the vulnerable aren’t citizens deserving protection but “useless eaters.”

Democracy can’t survive this sort of empathy deficit, as Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out when he said, “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

But as we’ll explore in the next chapter, this isn’t inevitable. Resistance remains possible. Reform is achievable. The democratic ideal of our Founders and most presidents since that time—a government of, by, and for the people—still lives in the hearts of millions of Americans who refuse to accept a nation without empathy.