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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.