Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.
In a country torn and packed with anger, cruelty, pain and violence, love, empathy and sympathy would all be extremely valuable. Yet they are all hard to come by when the Democrats and Republicans have been at each other's throats for years and the issues that divide them concern abortion, guns, racial strife, jobs, immigrants, the minimum wage, and the national debt.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated nonviolent resistance in order to eliminate social and economic injustice toward African Americans and "ultimately" create the "beloved community." In this community love would triumph over hate, but it would be a God-inspired love more than a personal love of family members. King called for forgiveness, empathy, redemption, respect and reconciliation.
In our current political climate, getting Democrats to empathize with election deniers and Republicans to empathize with pro-choice Democratic women is too tall an order. And eliciting sympathy or genuine care for one's political opponents who want guns or want corporations to pay higher taxes is just asking too much. Cognitive understanding of one another, however, may be in reach.
For the record, it is important to appreciate that almost all political theorists since Plato have not defended theories of the just society by focusing on capacities for empathy or care or sympathy. Most of them, especially the leading figures in both the liberal and socialist traditions, have drawn on muscular concepts of human rights, social contracts, autonomy, alienation, exploitation, and laws of economic determinism to ground their theories. They all certainly talk about desires, but feelings are traditionally regarded as too fleeting and personal to provide an adequate foundation to justify political practices for a state.
Admittedly, some British philosophers who defended capitalism and liberalism, including Adam Smith, David Hume and Jeremy Bentham, have given considerable attention to concepts of human sentiments. Yet even these thinkers, like other political theorists, as a rule, have created linkages between feelings and more general concepts like impartiality. Only in recent decades have a range of feminist moral and political philosophers, many influenced by Carol Gilligan's groundbreaking work in moral psychology, supported an "ethics of care" and a "politics of care." They made some ground on paid parental leave, child care and elder care, but the dominant disputes about political economy and international relations have been out of reach.
Given the rancor and hostility of our politics today, seeking cognitive understanding of each other is a much less daunting task. It is not necessary to get someone to respect your point of view for them to empathize with you. Empathy requires feeling what the other feels. It means imagining the pain she has, really feeling it, when she lost a child to cancer or a gun wound. Empathy is a beautiful human capacity. But it can be very hard to cultivate, and some people may be genetically ill equipped to be empathic.
Our politics thus needs more mutual understanding -- more talking, more listening, more efforts to understand others and their suffering, and more efforts to understand their moral and empirical beliefs and values. Empathy can enrich understanding, but you can achieve a good deal of understanding without employing a capacity for empathy. We don't use empathy to understand geometry, biology or physics. Cognitive understanding is powerful. It involves using our rational capacities to grasp facts, concepts and theories. It can also help us understand each other.
Understanding others is not sufficient to resolve conflicts, though it is necessary. We will never make progress if we don't even know what our opponents believe and stand for and why. Perhaps the best place to start is with the 43% of Americans (according to Gallup) who identify as independents. After all, all Americans are not pure Democrats or pure Republicans. And many of those independents would be more likely to move more in the direction of what King called the "beloved community."
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. promoted the use of dramatic nonviolent protest to foster better understanding of the injustice of discrimination. He wanted to mobilize African Americans to fight the discrimination, domination and death that afflicted them. He also sought to mobilize what he always called the "white moderate." His impact was monumental. At this time in our history, using our cognitive powers to improve our understanding of one another is a realistic goal. Seeking the beloved community could take us off track, even though we may at some point be able to seek this ultimate end.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.