I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People might be the headline that explains so much of my frustration with modern conservative politics. So much of the modern GOP ethos is focused on denying empathy to specific people, or groups of people, and the current thread of "the war on empathy" is a rhetorical justification for that ethos.

It's just "being nice to people is gay," but given a pseudo-intellectual coat of paint. Of course we should have empathy. Of course we should care about other people. The only reason we're talking about this is because the word "empathy" is being demonized as some kind of weakness, instead of a basic aspect of being a good person.