Ideas

Roman Krznaric’s new book is Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It. He is a faculty member of The School of Life in London and founder of the world’s first digital Empathy Library.

From everyday interactions to global conflicts, we've hit rock-bottom in compassion. Here's how you can be more understanding

You can lose your hair, lose your temper or even lose your mind. But can you lose your empathy? Absolutely, according to recent research, and it’s happening now in America. Empathy—the ability to step imaginatively into the shoes of another person and understand their feelings and perspectives—seems to be in freefall.

The evidence is striking. The US is facing a boom in digital abuse: over 70% of adults have experienced online harassment and trolling. Studies show a long-term decline in empathy levels amongst college students of nearly 50% in the past three decades. Other research reveals that the wealthier you are, the less empathic you are likely to be—a growing concern as inequality is widening. And, disturbingly, senior executives are four times more likely to resemble psychopaths who are devoid of empathy than the average worker. Beyond the US too, it’s hard to miss the deepening empathy deficit, from terrorism to religious conflict and civil wars.

What can be done to turn around this empathy decline? Fortunately, a good deal. The latest neuroscience research tells us that 98% of us have the ability to empathise wired into our brains, but we’re living far below our empathic potential. We now confront a generational challenge – in the face of hyper-individualism and online culture – to switch on our empathic brains and regenerate our empathy, both as individuals and as a society. Here are five ideas from my new book, Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It, for doing so.

1. Stop, shhhh, and listen

If you’re arguing with your partner, neighbor or child, step back for a moment and try to listen out for two things: what the other person is feeling and what they need. Give them a chance to express those feelings and needs, and even reflect back what they’ve said so they recognise that you understand them. It works to reduce the tension, both in the living room and the boardroom. Research by psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, founder of Non-Violent Communication, shows that in employee-employer disputes, if both sides agree to simply repeat what the other side just said before they start speaking themselves, conflict resolution is reached 50% faster.

2. Ask your barista how her life is going

A significant barrier to empathy is the stereotypes and prejudices we have about others, often due to snap judgements based on their appearance or accent. And we’re so often wrong about people. What do you really know about the life of the heavily pierced woman who delivers your mail? What’s happening in the mind of the quiet Sikh accountant who always sits by himself in the office cafeteria? A good prescription for empathic health is to have a conversation with a stranger at least once a week that gets beyond superficial talk.

3. Travel by armchair

“You never really understand another person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it,” wrote Harper Lee in To Kill A Mockingbird. Reading books and watching films is a great way to take imaginative journeys into other people’s lives. To promote this kind of armchair travel, I have founded the world’s first online Empathy Library, where you can find reviews of hundreds of novels, children’s books, feature films and video shorts all on the theme of stepping into others’ shoes.

4. Look deep into your colleagues’ eyes

If we want to bring the benefits of empathy to the workplace—which include better teamwork, leadership and creativity—then it’s essential to create an empathically attuned workforce with high levels of emotional intelligence. A good place to start is for empathy tests to be part of job recruitment processes. Empathy is tough to measure, but over the last twenty years psychologists have developed effective ways of doing so, such as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. When shown a pair of eyes, you must choose the correct word describing the person’s emotional state – such as arrogant, annoyed, upset or terrified. Highly empathic people are skilled at this kind of emotional reading.

5. Turn a baby into a teacher

The most profound and lasting way to reverse the empathy decline is to teach empathy skills in the classroom. The word’s most effective program, Roots of Empathy, began in Canada and is spreading worldwide: over half a million children have done it. How does it work? The teacher is a baby who visits a class group regularly over a year. The children sit around the baby and discuss questions: What’s she thinking? What’s she feeling? It’s a stepping stone to developing their empathic imaginations. And it works, increasing empathy levels, boosting cooperation, reducing school yard bullying and even increasing general academic attainment. Shouldn’t every child have the right to do programs like Roots of Empathy?

America’s empathy may be in decline but it can come back. For the sake of a healthy society, there are few more important tasks.

Roman Krznaric’s new book is Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It. He is a faculty member of The School of Life in London and founder of the world’s first digital Empathy Library.

Nick Gillespie is the editor in chief of Reason.com and Reason.tv.

The next two years are the Republicans’ time—if they use it wisely.

You can forgive Republicans for thinking the midterm elections were all about them. Hell, they picked up seven Senate seats — and legislative control — from Democrats and added at least 10 seats to their House majority (some races are not yet finalized). Controversial GOP governors such as Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Florida’s Rick Scott withstood tough re-election challenges and more state legislatures are in Republican hands than ever before.

Yet Republicans mistake the meaning of the midterms at their own peril. These elections were a particularly frank repudiation of Barack Obama and the past six years of failed stimulus, disastrous foreign policy, and rotten economic news. Even the president’s historic health-care reform remains a negative with voters. But if the GOP thinks it has a mandate to return to the equally unpopular bailout economics and social conservatism of the George W. Bush years, it too will be sent packing as early as the next election.

A few days before the midterms, just 33% of respondents in an ABC News/Washington Post poll gave the GOP a “favorable” rating, which was 6 percentage points lower than what they gave the Democrats. A whopping 60% said that President Obama had no “clear plan for governing,” but even more (66%) said the Republicans lacked one.

Even as the Republican “wave” was cresting in real time on Tuesday night, reports my Reason colleague Matt Welch, GOP-friendly Fox News analysts such as Brit Hume, George Will, and Charles Krauthammer didn’t pretend this was a vindication of the party’s agenda for America. “It’s striking how unanimous they are that this election really doesn’t have much to do with Republicans suddenly waking up and smelling the vision,” wrote Welch. “They just didn’t get in the way of a restive electorate during a particularly painful six-year-itch.”

The long-term trends in voter self-identification underscore the electorate’s lack of trust or confidence in either party, but especially the Republicans. In 1988, according to Gallup, 36 percent of Americans called themselves Democrats. Now only 31 percent do. Nowadays, just 25 percent of us cop to being Republicans, down from about 32 percent. At the same time, a record-high 42 percent define themselves as politically independent.

As can be gleaned from some of the midterms’ other results, voters want a government that keeps its nose out of our private lives and morality. Alaska, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. all legalized recreational pot and staunchly anti-abortion “fetal personhood” initiatives were voted down in the two states that put the matter before voters (support for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that guarantees a woman’s right to a first-trimester abortion, has remained above 50 percent for decades). Gallup finds fewer and fewer Americans think the state should “promote traditional values.” Currently, 48 percent agree with that notion while an equal number says “the government should not favor any particular set of values.”

At the same time, twice as many Americans think there’s too much regulation of business and the economy as believe there’s too little and 59% think the government has “too much power.” That’s up 17 percentage points from a decade ago.

If the Republicans are actually listening to the voters, they would do well to drop the social issues that they have harped on in the past and focus instead on reducing the size, scope, and spending of government. Unfortunately, there’s every reason to believe that the new GOP Congress will be ready to increase spending on the military and old-age entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. Headlines like “Election Outcome is Good News for Defense Industry” pretty much tell you all you need to know about Republican attitudes toward the former.

And when it comes to programs that disproportionately benefit seniors while beggaring the rest of us, remember that it was a Republican president and Congress that forced through Medicare Part D, the prescription drug plan that was as unnecessary as it was expensive. A survey of the campaign websites of incoming Republican senators found very little in the way of specific promises to cut specific programs but lots of verbiage declaring undying support to “protect” and “preserve” Medicare and Social Security, two of the biggest ticket items in the federal budget.

In his 2012 bestseller The People’s Money, pollster Scott Rasmussen reported that after a prolonged, bipartisan spending binge in which federal outlays grew by 55% in inflation-adjusted dollars, fully two-thirds of Americans supported “finding spending cuts in all government programs. Every budget item, Americans emphatically believe, needs to be on the table.” A week before the midterms, fully 57% of voters were on board for cuts, but only 19% “trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time.”

The next two years are the Republicans’ time. If they use it wisely, they may well be at the start of a long-term ascendancy. But if they disrespect the rising numbers of independent voters, they will be back in the minority faster than they realize.

The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C.

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The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C.

Can Republicans agree on a leader to take back the White House?

It’s going to be hard for Republicans to restrain their enthusiasm after their breathtaking victories on Nov. 4 in the Senate, the House and state capitols across the country. But they should. If we’ve learned anything about American politics over the past several years, it is that the electorate is far friendlier to Democrats in presidential years than it is in midterms, which is why the GOP triumph in 2010 was quickly followed by deep disappointment in 2012. At the risk of taking away the punch bowl too soon, GOP victories in states like Colorado and North Carolina were narrower than they should have been, considering that the electorates in those states will be younger and less white in two years, which will make them less hospitable terrain. Ed Gillespie’s near victory in Virginia was a welcome surprise. Yet Virginia is a state that Republicans ought to have in the bag in presidential years, and they don’t.

To win the White House, republicans will need a presidential candidate who understands how the country has changed since the Bush era and who offers a welcome contrast to the aging Clinton dynasty. But who will it be?

If Scott Walker had failed in his bid for re-election as governor of Wisconsin, he’d have instantly become a historical footnote. Instead, conservatives cheered as he won his third statewide election in four years. The case for Walker is that he’s demonstrated that he can fight and win against entrenched liberal interest groups and that his unpretentious, everyman style will play well in the all-important upper Midwest. The case against him is that in a dangerous world, the former county executive doesn’t have the experience or the know-how to be Commander in Chief.

Good news for Walker is, alas, bad news for Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor once considered the most formidable 2016 GOP contender. The Christie brand has lost much of its luster since the trumped-up Bridgegate imbroglio, though the governor is still a great talent. Christie’s pitch is not all that different from Walker’s: Both men have tangled with powerful public-worker unions. Both are unapologetic conservatives who’ve won in blue states. The difference is that Christie is seen–unfairly–as closer to President Obama than any Republican should be, and that perception will be difficult to overcome.

Something similar is true of Jeb Bush, the would-be white knight of the GOP establishment. Had the midterms been a disaster for the GOP, the case for Jeb would have been much stronger: once again, Republicans would need to turn to the Bush family to unite a party in disarray. The GOP’s strong showing instead suggests that a new generation is ready to take the helm.

One candidate who definitely got a boost from the midterms is Rand Paul, the junior Senator from Kentucky, who played a crucial role in sparing Republican leader Mitch McConnell from an ignominious defeat. Though McConnell opposed Paul in the 2010 GOP Senate primary, they’ve developed a strong working relationship as Paul has lent his Establishment colleague some of the young libertarian firebrands who fueled his come-from-behind victory. McConnell ran one of the most social-media-savvy campaigns in the country, a preview of what’s to come from a Paul presidential campaign. Rand Paul often takes positions–on mass surveillance, on drone strikes, on the war on drugs, on the size of government–at odds with those of mainstream Republicans. Yet he’s also developed an ability to soften some of his more hard-edged stances for public consumption. Moreover, GOP successes in gubernatorial races in deep-blue states like Massachusetts and Maryland lend credence to his argument that the GOP needs to welcome socially liberal voters.

And finally we have Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, junior Senators from Texas and Florida, respectively. Though Cruz and Rubio both came to office as Tea Party stalwarts, they’ve developed very different profiles. Cruz presents himself as the uncompromising defender of small-government conservatism who is willing to risk a federal shutdown or default in defense of his ironclad principles. Rubio, in contrast, is emerging as the candidate of middle-class aspiration, with a focus on reforming failing government institutions to tackle wage stagnation and the barriers to upward mobility.

Watch these two young Senators to see which path the GOP will take.n

Salam is the executive editor of National Review

Joe Klein is TIME's political columnist and author of six books, most recently Politics Lost. His weekly TIME column, "In the Arena," covers national and international affairs. In 2004 he won the National Headliner Award for best magazine column.

To win in 2016, she will need to appear fresh, aggressive and optimistic

On the Sunday before the 2014 election, a vision–perhaps a fantasy–of the future of the Democratic Party was on display at a get-out-the-vote rally in Nashua, N.H. The first speaker was Ray Buckley, chairman of the state party. Every other speaker, and there were lots, was a woman. There were two female candidates for state senate from the Nashua area. There was one of New Hampshire’s two (out of two) female members of Congress. There was Maggie Hassan, the incumbent governor. There was Jeanne Shaheen, a former governor locked in a tight race for another term in the U.S. Senate. Hillary Clinton was there too–at the last rally of 45 campaign stops she made for Democratic candidates during the 2014 campaign.

New Hampshire has always been a magic place for the Clintons. In 1992, Bill Clinton’s second-place finish gave him new life amid the Gennifer Flowers and draft-evasion scandals. In 2008, crushed by Barack Obama in Iowa, Hillary Clinton almost shed a frustrated tear on the day before the primary, then won, narrowly, keeping her candidacy alive. “You lifted me up, gave me my voice back,” she told the Nashua crowd. “You taught me so much about grit and determination.” A big “Ready for Hillary” truck was in the parking lot. It seemed the 2016 campaign had begun.

A few days later, 4 out of 5 of the female candidates onstage in Nashua won re-election, but it was an empty victory, since Democrats were crushed across the country. No doubt, the Republican sweep can be attributed to the unloved Obama, and to the fact that Presidents usually fare badly in their sixth-year election, and to the states in play, which favored the Republicans. But the Democratic candidates were weak and inept; they seemed defensive, reflexive, played out. They pretty much limited themselves to women’s issues, and those were clearly not enough to convince a frightened and frustrated country.

I watched Clinton speak three times during the campaign, and she limited herself to women’s issues too, but she did it cleverly. The emphasis was on economics rather than reproductive rights. She was especially good on the economic impact of pay equity: working women would have more money to spend, and they would spend it on consumer goods, which would create jobs–the opposite of trickle-down economics. She told specific personal stories about her difficulties as a working mom. She spoke slowly, softly, far more confidently than she had in past campaigns. There was a two-tiered rationale for her message: she was spot-on the Democrats’ national pitch, a good soldier selling the blue brand, but the emphasis on women’s rights also redressed a failing from her 2008 campaign. She had run on “experience” then and downplayed the fact that she was a piece of history: the first plausible woman to run for President. She doesn’t have to worry about experience now; everyone knows she has it. The question is, how does she play to her strengths as a woman if she chooses to run? (And I assume she will.) And how does she convince voters that she’s not the same old, same old?

The 2014 exit polls indicated that both political parties are roundly disdained. The Republicans earned their enmity because of their angry, intransigent extremism, but they may be emerging from the swamp. Their candidates this year were more moderate (though they still pandered shamelessly to the party’s paranoid base). Even Mitch McConnell was making postelection noises about getting stuff done in Washington. This raises a potential problem for Democrats. It could put a crimp in one of their strongest arguments: We’re not Republicans.

There are two even larger, perhaps existential problems for the Dems. They are the party of government, and people don’t like government. They don’t think it works. The botched rollout of Obamacare is far more persuasive to many people than its ensuing successes. Additionally, Democrats have allowed themselves to be lulled by demographics. They are strong among growing blocs: women, young people, minorities. Consequently, they have come to seem a party of identities rather than issues. They don’t speak to a larger, unifying sense of America; they speak to women and try to get out the vote among blacks, Latinos and students. They have come to seem opportunistic rather than optimistic.

The Obama Presidency is crippled, not dead. There will be opportunities for compromise and even triumph. But the Democrats are now Hillary Clinton’s party. She will be challenged for the nomination, and she will have to adjust to new political realities. She will also have to figure out a way to seem fresh, aggressive and optimistic–the precise opposite of the candidates the Democrats put forward in 2014.

TO READ JOE’S BLOG POSTS, GO TO time.com/swampland