Reading Hillary Clinton’s most recent article, “MAGA’s War on Empathy,” it’s hard not to have at least some sympathy, and perhaps even empathy, for her.
Yes, Clinton was one of the most ruthless political operators of the last century, a woman who would seemingly do almost anything in pursuit of power. She was extremely close to becoming president, the prize she had always wanted, before being thwarted by Donald Trump of all people, a figure she treated as little more than an absurdity during much of her 2015-16 campaign.
It would be easy to dismiss anything Clinton writes as simple, cynical political posturing. And to be sure, there is plenty of politicized misrepresentation of facts in her latest article. And yet her recent piece attacking the Trump GOP for its supposed lack of empathy, using Minneapolis as a backdrop, is revealing, for it lays bare the moral core of today’s Democratic Party.
If her piece were just political and not reflective to some degree of her sincere belief, she could have done it as an X post or a short op-ed—she certainly didn’t need 6,000 words in The Atlantic to make her case. In this respect I differ somewhat from Pastor Joe Rigney, one of the targets of Clinton’s ire, who wrote his own excellent response. Clinton wrote this essay because, to a certain extent, she means it.
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