During the Democratic National Convention in August, it did not take a political communications professional to glean that the Biden camp was using “empathy” as a slogan. As a rhetorical strategy, this was a smart way to highlight some of the character deficiencies of President Trump. This was never an official campaign slogan, but it was a catchword they used, alongside “decency,” quite intentionally. “Empathy matters in a president,” a Biden campaign video on Facebook was titled. There was a meeting about it, I assure you.
There’s nothing nefarious about this. Political campaigns use communications strategies involving repeating certain bits of language designed to bring attention to the areas in which their candidate has the advantage in terms of appeal. The ability to notice, care about, imagine, and account for the potential hurt feelings of others is an area in which Biden has an optics edge on Trump. On the last night before Election Day, Trump spent about a half-hour of one of his rallies doing an extended series of mean improv comedy bits about how bad a job the audio tech people had done in setting up his microphone. When a tech guy came onstage to fix a feedback problem, Trump had the crowd of thousands jeer at him and cracked that maybe the campaign wouldn’t pay for the services.
Yet, I have two gripes with their use of “empathy.” One is a pedantic gripe about the word itself, and one is a bigger one about how the press uses political campaign catchwords. First, as an Atlantic article about how “Biden’s Empathy Is What Matches Him to This Moment” defines it: “Empathy is the quality of putting yourself in the place of another, understanding how they are experiencing the world, identifying with their feelings, and being able to communicate that understanding to them.” This is a longer way of explaining that em is Greek for “in” and pathos is Greek for feelings. Empaths can get into others’ feelings. But for this same reason, we should understand that a guy such as Trump is not incapable of empathy as such. He’s actually very good at getting into other people’s heads, in some ways. He knows perfectly well how being booed by a large crowd will make a mic setup guy feel. He can model others’ thinking. It’s just that he values different things in communication and in life, like a comic has different goals than a therapist.
By “empathic,” political analysts in the 2020 election cycle actually meant “prosocial” or “kind” or “altruistic” or even just “gooey.” But they said, “Empathy.” They said it a lot. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of pieces. In CNN: “Joe Biden’s endorsers highlight the same trait: empathy.” In the Atlantic again: “No Empathy, Only Anger.”
And why did they all use this same word? Because they didn’t do the part of a journalist’s job that requires thinking carefully about language and trying to at least be aware of repeating catchwords pushed by political campaigns, even when one agrees. Pro-Trump outlets should not talk about “putting America first” without so much as being aware they are using political sloganeering associated with a certain movement. Agree or disagree with the agenda, it’s just careless writing for a journalist. And the “empathy” thing, while different in content, was a Democratic version of that. Taking greater care with words is one way media organizations could avoid doing the things that are cratering their credibility with the public.
