The Conservative Lack of Imagination

What creates a politics of minimum empathy and maximal entitlement?

Photo by Michal Matlon on Unsplash

This is the free weekly edition of this newsletter. If you’re enjoying it, please feel free to upgrade to a paid subscription — this work is 100% supported by readers like you.

There is so much to say about the conservative governors who are using desperate migrants as political pawns, and misleading people legally seeking asylum into boarding buses and airplanes to a small island community where they will have a rough time accessing the legal and social welfare resources they need. What kind of person uses scared and hungry human beings, including children, for cheap political stunts? What kind of person cheers him on?

The answer is self-styled Christian conservatives — the same people who claim to be pro-life, who claim to stand up for families and the vulnerable.

There is so much to say about the cruelty and inhumanity on display from these men and their supporters — how they relish the abject suffering they are causing, how they find it funny and entertaining.

But what strikes me the most is the total lack of imagination from conservatives. They do not imagine themselves suffering; they do not imagine themselves needing help. And that fantasy drives their cruelty politics.

We should obviously help people simply to help people, but part of the genesis of refugee resettlement and asylum law was a postwar era in which a great many people from a great many different countries could indeed imagine the world falling apart — could imagine themselves needing safe harbor, a safe place. For many Americans, this is the story of our grandparents; for others, the story of our parents, or ourselves.

Others, though, are committed to forgetting.

Despite claims of an imperiled America, Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis, and their followers seem unable to imagine a universe in which their country is not a safe place for them to live; they cannot imagine a scenario in which they cannot afford food, or can’t send their kids to school, or are under threat of deadly violence for their political beliefs or their ethnicity or their religion. The self-styled tough guys of the Republican Party, who claim that they would defend their families at all costs — who demand nearly unlimited access to weapons of war so that they can defend their families at a great cost to the rest of us — are unwilling to imagine what they might actually do if their families were in danger and staying home was no longer an option.

The families that are fleeing violence and oppression, toting scared kids into a great unknown? These are the tough guys (and tough gals) defending their families at all costs. Somehow, conservatives cannot imagine being in their shoes.

This lack of imagination extends beyond immigration. Consider the abortion debate: While I suspect most people don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about whether they will ever need an abortion, when the issue comes into the public realm, many of us are indeed able to pause and consider the circumstances under which we may — and even people who generally oppose abortion rights often do want the option preserved to save their life, preserve their health, or in the cases of rape or a fetus that will not survive. And of course we know that in reality many millions of women who oppose abortion rights have had abortions under circumstances they would make illegal for others; we know many millions of anti-abortion men have encouraged, paid for, and supported abortions under circumstances they would make illegal.

But this lack of imagination animates anti-abortion politics, too. It’s why at least some conservatives seem so surprised that the very things abortion rights advocates warned about are coming to fruition — pregnant women who can’t get life- and health-saving care; child rape victims forced into motherhood; IVF under threat; women having miscarriages or carrying ectopic pregnancies forced to risk their lives, struggle through potentially deadly infections, and sometimes lose their uteruses or ovaries because of “pro-life” policies. They couldn’t imagine that their own policies might come for their wives, their daughters, themselves.

This lack of imagination animates social welfare policies, where it also ties in with racism. Even while many conservatives do rely on the social safety net, from food stamps to cash benefits to social security to disability to unemployment to Medicaid, they do not imagine themselves as the kind of people who are “on welfare” (those people, in the conservative imagination and in right-wing political narratives, are Black and brown). This makes it easier to demonize welfare programs; it makes it easier to cut those programs and lean into a story of self-reliance, no matter how false it is.

To empathize with other human beings, you have to have the capacity and willingness to imagine being them. I’m not sure where, when, or why so many American conservatives began to simply cut off that part of their humanity, and how such a stubborn lack of imagination coupled with such tremendous personal entitlement became so wholly engrained into the American right, but it is poisonous — to the country, to basic human decency.

And I am not sure how you fix a person who has no capacity or willingness to consider the lives of others.

xx Jill

This is the free weekly edition of this newsletter. If you’re enjoying it, please feel free to upgrade to a paid subscription — this work is 100% supported by readers like you.