There is little that can surprise these days in terms of Republican attacks on President Obama. And yet, the discussion that Obama’s tears at his January 5 press conference unveiling new executive orders to help stop gun violence were somehow fake seemed to mark a new low. What would make someone mock a person for crying at the senseless, violent deaths of elementary-aged children and a few heroic teachers? Or any of the victims of mass shootings?
Empathy, or rather the lack of it, is what occurred to me. When the President cried, he was not just sad about the deaths. As the father of two daughters, he was able to understand the horror of sending a child off to school one December morning and then receiving notice that the unthinkable had happened and they were gone forever. This skill separates just leaders from those who abuse their authority; moreover, it is at the core of maintaining a functional society. Replace empathy with egoism and the bonds that connect people will begin to disintegrate. The 20th Century is of course littered with examples of this, from Cambodia to Germany to the juntas of South America. And yet, here in our country, we also have experience with this — from those who enforced chattel slavery, ultimately resulting in the Civil War, to the Reagan administration and the White House press pool having a laugh at the millions of victims of the AIDS crisis.
For a certain crowd, the notion of the most powerful man on the planet being reduced to tears over the deaths of ordinary people he had no connection to was implausible on its face.
So what causes a lack of empathy? Some people show signs of anti-social behavior from infancy. There is a significant number of experts who would say our entire political class is made up of sociopaths and psychopaths. I disagree. There is another force at work that prevents otherwise-empathetic people from expressing compassion — toxic masculinity. While this term emerging from feminist theory is far from perfect, and has a rather ideological ring to it, it provides a useful template for understanding the phenomenon of empathetic men being belittled in terms of their masculinity.
We can see this play out in the case of the President. Barack Obama stands at 6’ 1”, and is easily the most physically fit President in generations. Suave, handsome, successful, if he were white he could fit in as the idealized father figure on a classic TV sitcom like Leave It To Beaver. Consider, however, how quickly the media rushes to ‘feminize’ him: in 2014, TIME’s Michael Crowley tweeted a photo collage of our President riding a bike in Martha’s Vineyard alongside Vladimir Putin’s latest shirtless horse ride. Sarah Jones writing in PoliticusUSA observed that the image had thrown “the right wing into a lustful Putin frenzy from which they have not yet recovered their dignity.” The authoritarian mindset that dominates right-wing politics craves the power-driven affirmation of masculinity that Putin has so successfully employed to rule Russia without any concern for abstract principles like minority rights or the rule of law. And it is enabled by a corporate media that has a profit motive for enforcing gender roles, no matter the cost to our democracy.
So here’s my goal for 2016: let empathy define a new masculinity. Do not allow expressions of compassion be used to question someone’s manhood. When the GOP candidates talk about “muscular” foreign policy, point out that there’s nothing strong in sending someone else’s kids to die for BushCo blunders — it’s cowardly. Challenge the assumption that emotional vulnerability is a weakness and view it as a strength. The future of our nation could depend on it.