The Erosion of Empathy

My Experience Living Under Modern Republican Governance

I’ve lived in the deep red state of Indiana for 30 years. In fact, I was born here, then grew up in Arizona from the ages of four to 12, when our family returned to Indiana so that my siblings and I would be closer to our grandparents as they aged.

That’s all to say that for the past three decades, I’ve lived under solid Republican state governance. At least some of that time, we had politicians like Richard Lugar (R), Evan Bayh (D), and Joe Donnelly (D) who worked with their colleagues across the aisle. I don’t want to glorify days gone by of bipartisanship. I was barely old enough to vote with some of these politicians. Besides, I’ve aligned with pro-union, pro-social services political stances for as long as I can remember. My political slant has always been left.

But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Lugar, Bayh, and Donnelly are names from pre-Tea Party politics when I don’t remember the same vitriol.

Maybe that’s bullshit.

What do I know?

But Lugar was primaried by a less experienced hard-right dude with atrocious views about a woman’s right to autonomy, backed by outside hard-right political action groups. And Donnelly ultimately lost his senate seat to Mike Braun (now Indiana Governor), who ran his campaign on smearing Donelly, calling him “Mexico Joe,” alleging Donnelly’s involvement with his brother’s company that outsourced jobs to Mexico and China, made him anti-American. The Donnelly campaign quickly pointed out that Braun’s own manufacturing operation imports parts from China, but there is no need to relitigate the past.

I do think that it is worth noting that the modern Republican strategy of giving their political opponents petty nicknames was leveraged effectively by Braun: “Mexico Joe.” I can still remember the attack ads. “Little Marco,” “Lying Kamala,”; “Let’s Go, Brandon,” and “Sleepy Joe Biden”—it’s been decades of childish name-calling. Even the mockery of VP Harris used sarcastically after Trump’s 2024 win, “We’ll unburden ourselves of all that came before,” evoking VP Harris’s remarks about young Black girls overcoming all that stand in their way to achieve success is nothing but mean-spirited and arrogant.

Lugar’s primary defeat and later Donnelly’s loss to the hard-right candidate, Braun, were bellwethers. It was no surprise that Trump backed Braun for Indiana governor. Braun had happily toed the line, espousing the Big Lie about election fraud in the 2020 general election. These days, Braun is bragging about his own “I-DOGE” initiative to bring the federal DOGE slash-and-burn approach back home to Indiana. Meanwhile, Braun is parroting all the same Trumpist nonsense, barring things by executive order like “extreme gender ideology.”

This is only anecdotal, but I should point out that I’ve met personally with Mike Braun three times, twice in person and once virtually. In each of the three meetings, he peered on, arms crossed, and challenged me to defend the medical funding increases that I asked him to co-sponsor with the tone and attitude of an oppositional press conference and not as though he was addressing a man with a wife and kids, living with brain cancer, making an impassioned plea to give the NIH just a little bit more, like Oliver Twist.

One of the times I met with Joe Donelly, he observed my cane. He welcomed Whitney and our Indiana delegation to step from his senate office lobby into his private office, where he directed me to sit on his couch to rest. Then he pointed out that he was wearing sneakers, too, and only put on his dress shoes when he went to the floor for a vote. I’ve developed relationships with other lawmakers, but that experience with Donnelly was the most memorable, empathetic, and compassionate.

You can see the difference between two men by how they treat someone with less power than they have.

I continue to be frustrated by two things about Republicans. Their mean-spiritedness is something I’ll never understand. Like Trump mocking a disabled reporter or Ann Coulter mocking Governor Tim Walz’s son on the campaign trail. It’s hard not to think that the core of the modern Republican party is bullying. I think this stems from a very Hobbesian view of human nature that I’ve written about.

My greater frustration is the all-in anti-democratic position that Republicans have either accepted or refused to stop. I think bullying is a significant concern because it leads to dehumanization. Mass deportations are a combination of bullying and anti-democratic principles. All of a sudden, you’re deporting legal residents with no criminal record to El Salvador and refusing to return them, citing an “administrative error.” Apparently, kidnapping a father to be imprisoned, a father with legal status, no criminal record, a job, a wife, and a disabled child is an “Oopsie.”

It’s absolutely the case that modern Republicans don’t like democracy, and that article is already two years old! What I can’t wrap my mind around is how everyday people like me seem happy to watch our civil liberties crumble. From disappearing people off the street to ignoring judicial review, even blaming hundreds of court injunctions to slow or stop illegal Trump Executive Orders on the doing of liberal judges, activist judges, traitors who must be impeached. It’s the same: everything is a hoax, and everything is a witch-hunt rhetoric that propels the Trumpist cult of personality.

Post-general, everyone began saying FAFO to Trump voters: fuck around and find out. Man, I get the desire to see people pay for what they welcome, and I think strategically, many Trump voters won’t be convinced to leave the cult until they experience a direct impact. But I worry that FAFO is a way for my peers on the left to alienate Trump voters in the same way they’ve dismissed us as lunatics and extremists. I know this puts me out of step with some friends, but I found something valuable in Michelle Obama’s “They go low, we go high” rhetoric. Maybe it’s just my optimistic view of humanity.

I supposed what I’ve learned from probably a solid year of making explicitly political videos for social media is that my facts, reasoning, and even shared middle-class, paycheck-to-paycheck solidarity with my Republican neighbors is not quite enough to draw them away from clearly anti-Constitutional actions from the sitting admin.

The value of the videos I create is effective for building community and giving voice to frustrations that others may not articulate in quite the same way, but what I didn’t expect is that two months on, I still get comments and DMs that I need to give Elon Musk more time, and don’t I want to root out the fraud, waste, and abuse of my tax dollars? Don’t I want to mass deport gang members? Isn’t it common sense that “men aren’t women,” and lower courts shouldn’t be able to overturn presidential action?

The medical funding cuts may be the most outrageous because almost everyone I know knows that I’ve been deeply involved in patient political advocacy for years. It’s nothing short of hurtful that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are trusted more than I, a normal dude with cancer who’s given years of his life to serving others through peer support and advocacy with and for others with devastating cancer.

Living for 30 years in a deeply red state has taught me that insults work, dehumanization is effective, Republicans seek power before all else, and I am a trusted friend, so long as I don’t disagree with the party line.

The foundation of anti-democratic movement is to win trust away from your fellow Americans and award it to the ruling class. I’ll continue investing in my relationships because the opposite of fascism is community, but watching the GOP evolve by living under its state governance for 30 years frightens me that too many Americans are gleefully abandoning consent by the people to be governed.