Digby talks about the Right’s restricted empathy

Ever wonder why the Right’s empathy only seems to apply to a certain group of people?  Digby addresses this in her post entitled Empathic Myopia:

There’s something about the American right that requires a very specific degree of identification for them to be empathetic and it goes beyond race, although race is certainly a factor. They see these people in that jail in Haiti and see themselves — nice “normal” Americans — and they feel their pain at being wrongly accused. They suddenly demand that human rights be universal and stand firmly behind the constitutional tenet that one is innocent until proven guilty. They are aghast that these people could be ill treated in prison or not given all the safeguards we were all promised in their 8th grade history book.

But they are incapable of extending that same identification to “others,” people who aren't “like” them, that they couldn’t be related to or who don’t speak the same language. Those people aren’t Real people. And for many of them, that’s not just something they apply to non-Americans, but to their fellows as well. They assume that suspects are guilty until proven innocent all the time in America.

The Real American tribe is (mostly) white, socially traditional and politically conservative. People who fit that criteria are, quite literally, the only people they care about. (At the more extreme edge, they are the only people they think are really people.) They simply can’t empathize with those who don’t fit that mold.

via Hullabaloo.