The biggest reason I could never be a Republican is that they have zero empathy for anyone. With the exception being for someone who gets canceled for being racist.
This post is absolutely perfect, and the conversation about "wokeness" that followed was the perfect illustration. Dlew rightly said woke is vague and without meaning, which I largely agree with. What woke has become is a way to not only abandon empathy, but also mock those who chose to be empathetic.
I don't know...I think it's basically the age-old left v. right social argument. Hippies and their parents were having the same genre of argument with the free-love/drug movement. Like that, I think the woke thing is a bunch of boomers (and boomers at heart) seeing the damn youths take aggressively progressive positions (which the damn youths have been taking for at least the last century) and mocking them for it. Whether you characterize it as empathy v. mercilessness or sense v. absurdity, i think it's more or less the same argument that's been going on, mostly divided by generation, for a long time. Rush Limbaugh certainly participated in numerous iterations of this same argument, back in his heyday.
All that to say, I don't think there's anything particularly novel about the current iteration of the argument other than the specific issues of the day. I don't think this has created a mass abandonment of empathy, for instance.
I think characterizing it as an "abandonment of empathy" is a little too reductive. I think mercilessness is part of it (at least for some people), but I also think some of it is good old fashioned "get off my lawn" grumpiness, and part misunderstanding, and partly completely reasonable for some of the particularly absurd (and more extreme) stuff.
