The Democrats are back in power with a new economic mandate. But is that how they will actually govern?
Our guest host Christine Rosen sits down with Catherine Liu, a left-wing cultural critic and the author of “Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering.” Liu explains why Democratic elites are still invested in culture wars and are focusing on what she calls “trauma politics.”
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Christine Rosen: We’ve just come out of the midterm elections, a historic transfer of power to the Democratic Party. Are we over identity politics?
Catherine Liu: I’m afraid not. And I think that there is going to be a lot of resistance to its demise. I also think that there is too much at stake within the NGO industrial complex to wield trauma as a kind of blunt instrument to make elites fall into line.
I wish I could say that we’re heading toward a more objective, more just, more economically oriented politics on the left-liberal side of things, but I’ve been really shocked at how persistent this kind of identitarianism can be.
But I think that we’ve turned a corner. I was really, really heartened by the warm language that James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa and even Abdul El-Sayed were able to use. They were not lecturing people. This was a very different kind of campaigning.
Rosen: It’s an interesting departure from even just two years ago, in 2024, when identity politics language really dominated a lot of the Democratic Party’s message and they lost.
But I’ve sort of set you up by asking you about identity politics. In fact, you don’t really use that term a lot in your work. You talk about “trauma politics” and “trauma scripts.”
Liu: Thank you for noticing.
Rosen: I’m curious why you have chosen to use that word. What does that mean? What are some distinctions between that and identity politics?
Liu: I’m trying to get at the root of why identity politics was embraced by liberals and progressives. One of the things I found was that it was a successful strategy to talk about victimhood after the social movement sort of ran out of steam in the ’70s and especially in the ’80s.
It was an attempt to try to make a moral language out of a secular drive to create a more just society. So if we created this category about victimization and social inequity, we could maybe — and I’m saying “we” from the liberal-left point of view — peel some of the right wing or the conservatives or the religious people over to our side.
In the end, it became like a snowball. It just went out of control, partially because it was so successful at framing issues from the top down.
The Democrats in my lifetime, when I was coming up in the world in the ’80s, were really trying to grasp at straws about how they had lost popular appeal, so they appealed to these purely symbolic cultural things that didn’t look at actual economic struggles or economic redistribution.
In fact, since 2016, the Democratic Party elites kind of characterized the working-class man — the working-class white man — as the enemy of progress. I think that was a terrible, terrible politics and a terrible strategy.
These last elections showed incredible diversity of candidates that succeeded, but they succeeded because they were people of principle who happened to be people of color. And that I was very, very heartened by.
They didn’t play the people-of-color card first. They were people of principle.
Rosen: That’s interesting. Those of us on the conservative side of the aisle, including myself, have long critiqued what’s called therapy culture — this elevation of victimhood, promotion of fragility, lack of resilience. So a lot of what I read in your work wasn’t new to me in that sense, but I come at it from a different perspective.
I’m curious: Where do you see the trauma politics that you discuss and critique overlapping, fitting in — or not — with some of the longstanding conservative critique of therapy culture, for example?
Liu: The conservatives come out of a long tradition — I mean, not MAGA but traditional conservatives.
Rosen: Yes, thank you for making that distinction. [Laughs.]
Liu: Thank you. Because MAGA kind of embraced grievance and victimhood. But the conservative tradition comes out of what I think of as being a sense of the importance of strong boundaries between the personal and the political.
That was something that feminism wanted to overturn. But, this kind of idea of republicanism — small r — had to do with the fact that you took care of your family, your home, your being, your citizenship at home in a very private way, and then you emerged into the public to talk about and debate politics.
Therefore, when you had a disagreement, it wasn’t a personal issue. This is a very, very old Stoic tradition that comes out of the ancients, actually. And I think the left-liberal side of things went really crazy when they decided that disagreements were all personal and personal attacks.
Maybe this is where I fall more on the conservative side of things, and I am not afraid of that. People are like: Oh, my God, aren’t you afraid you’re going to be construed as right wing?
And I think it’s time for us to find common ground. If we can find common ground on this, then we can move forward as a country and make clear our disagreements and agreements but still feel committed to a common project, which is to heal this country, because things are very, very askew.
I was going to use a more vulgar word, but ——
Rosen: Our listeners thank you. [Laughs.]
Liu: Well, I’m at The Times, so I’m afraid. But if I were on a regular podcast, I would’ve said the word.
But the boundaries between public and private were really important for small-r republicanism. That comes out of the Enlightenment.
So I’m sorry that it became a conservative point of view, because I think this therapeutic language actually dovetailed really nicely with the massive consumerist attitude that women and minorities were encouraged to take about their own experiences, about their own identities.
I think that has been a personal detriment and a public detriment.
Rosen: “The personal is political,” which all young women grew up hearing from the feminist messaging, you attack straight on at the beginning of your book.
The example you give is one I remember being struck by at the time as well: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram Live about Jan. 6 and her experience and her revelation of having been a victim of sexual assault.
Why did you choose that particular moment to begin your critique of trauma politics?
Liu: I wanted to bookend this discourse with Ocasio-Cortez in the beginning and Oprah Winfrey at the end to show how this therapy culture is aligned with a kind of neoliberal agenda for self-objectification.
It was genuinely disappointing to me — because I was on that Instagram Live — to hear what she had to say on two levels. One, that she exposed herself and her great secrets when she admitted that many people close to her didn’t even know about it. I felt almost a maternal sense of protectiveness about her. She had been the target of so much misogynistic attack, especially from the right.
I was like: OK, I don’t know why you’re exposing yourself this way to more. I just wanted to give her a hug and move her away from her phone.
Second, one of the things I was expecting her to talk about, which I think is one of the most important parts of constitutional liberal democracy as we know it, is the question of peaceful succession. That was what was shaken on Jan. 6.
And I was like: Why don’t you just talk about this? This is what’s important: what’s happening to our country.
Rosen: She has always been an Instagram politician. From Day 1, she was livestreaming being a congresswoman for the first time. That’s how she often seems to cultivate her followers, even more than her actual bread-and-butter constituents. She’s gained a huge amount of cultural power from that.
Do you think that it was more that that’s who she is, an Instagram politician? Or was it the trauma politics in particular that made that message resonate for so many of her followers?
Liu: Instagram politics is trauma politics. Social media wants us to adhere to its values, its addictive sense of instant gratification and dopamine.
On the other hand, I have a big social media presence as well, and I don’t think it has to be that. It could be educational.
I thought this was a unique opportunity for a young politician who’s lived through this actual physical confrontation with a constitutional crisis that threatens the very ground of liberal democracy, if we’re going to believe in it, and she’s using this to confess to this very, very personal and private event in her life.
But what Winfrey shows is that this kind of thing on broadcast media can create more adhesion from your audience, expand your audience, legitimize your brand.
Rosen: It’s interesting you use the word “brand,” because I want to ask you how you think we got to this moment. So look back over not just the past 10 years, which have been a rather chaotic time in American politics and culture, but further back.
What is the reward mechanism that was put in place that encouraged not just our politicians but celebrities and now, with the advent of social media, ordinary people to constantly follow a trauma script and to see trauma as a kind of currency for attention? Is this a blip, or is this something you see having built over time? We got here because we made poor choices earlier on?
Liu: I don’t know about poor choices, but the structure of television was really, really transformed when Oprah Winfrey went on TV and confessed to having been a victim of childhood sexual abuse. She expanded the purview of what we could discuss in public on broadcast media at the time.
She synthesized the sort of transgressive ethos of the hippies with the entrepreneurialism self-objectification of yuppies.
At that moment, she was able to transform those two threads of American culture that were producing the 1980s into something that marked her brand forever. It legitimized her, differentiated her from Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, Sally Jessy Raphael and her most immediate competitor at the time, Phil Donahue. She really knew how to use the medium of television.
Television itself was always seen as somewhat vulgar, low and bad, from the middlebrow and highbrow cultural elites. One of the ways that it tried to legitimize itself in the ’50s and ’60s was that it wanted to make itself informative.
So they had a lot of talk shows. The sponsors would come on, like Lysol or Dove, but the selling was sort of marginalized, and the information and the discussion was supposed to model a democratic public sphere.
By the time you get to daytime television and 24-hour news cycles, you have an increasingly intensive need to sell, inform and draw your audience into this kind of intimacy that was very unique to the medium.
Now social media has taken on that role.
Rosen: Right. That has accelerated that trend significantly.
Winfrey, I think, also had a third strand, which appealed to people of a more traditional or conservative sensibility, which was bootstraps. She sort of pulled herself up. She liked to tell the story of how she grew up poor and how she built this empire for herself.
And I’m curious because — One of the things you do in your book that’s, again, perhaps a point of agreement for the right and the left today, is that you talk about how these trauma scripts have become a tool of the professional management class, the elites.
So criticism of the elites is now coming from both sides of the aisle pretty intensely. But what do you mean when you talk about this professional managerial class, How does it relate to our political culture more broadly?
Liu: Well, they were a class of credentialed experts, right?
I have a Ph.D. I worked hard to get it. I have a status in the academic world that I feel like I earned after 30 years, and we’re supposed to be somewhat neutral and protected from market forces.
What we’ve seen in the past — I don’t know — 50 years is the deep compromise of this class. Doctors were on the payroll of Big Pharma.
Professors were doing research that favored certain kinds of purposes for big donors, and we trusted these elites during the 1930s to right the ship after the big financial crisis. But I would say that this class has become increasingly willing to sacrifice the well-being of the majority of Americans for the profit of the capitalist class and for its own status as a protector of the status quo.
Rosen: Yes, I want to clarify that so our listeners understand. This is not just a critique of the elite or the ivory tower. You talk about the capitalist liberal elite. Where does that description fit with the Democratic Party today?
Liu: Up until the ’70s, the Democratic Party was dominated by working-class people in unions — non-college-educated people.
By ’77, they saw the complete takeover of the Democratic Party elite by what conservatives called the new class. I think Spiro Agnew called them the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
The conservatives understood that this class was taking power and was creating a huge rift between what the Democratic Party had once represented and what it was now going to represent. You could make a caricature of the Berkeley-to-Cambridge continuum.
In my very, very wealthy neighborhood in Orange County, we see signs in the yards: In this house we believe in science. In this house, we do this, this and this.
And there’s a lot of posturing that has to do with what I wrote about in “Virtue Hoarders,” which proclaims, on the consumerist side of things, more progressive consumerist practices that average Americans can’t afford.
Nobody — no family — can afford to shop at Whole Foods unless they’re making $500,000 a year. I’m just going to say that right now. A family, a family.
Rosen: Well, I’m glad you mentioned Orange County, home of the country club Republican label, right?
Liu: They’re disappearing.
Rosen: They’re almost gone. In their place, though, you have a kind of concierge Democratic Party, people who can afford Whole Foods, who can put those signs, “In this house, we believe ….”
To push a little bit on why you chose not to frame this as what conservatives have seen as a longstanding culture war. Culture war, culture war. And the argument has long been that that new class, those nattering nabobs, weren’t just trying to gain prestige and power; they actually had a brief to undermine traditional American values — to really challenge some of the premises of Western civilization — and that this was a real threat, not just an intellectual threat but a threat to future generations of Americans being raised in an environment where they were taught things that were incorrect.
Again, your framing is different. I found it really fascinating. I’m wondering, though, if there’s a reason you chose not to pitch this as part of a broader culture war and if you see it as distinct from that.
Liu: It is part of a larger culture war, but I was trying to look at how they’re waging a symbolic culture war on the one hand but practicing something completely different on the other. That was my target.
All of the sociological studies that have been done by people I really admire, like Jennifer Silva, have shown that the working-class family is completely destroyed in America. If you’re born into a working-class milieu of whatever race, you have more chance of being born out of wedlock than being born to married parents. The rate of divorce is going up in working-class circles in America.
These people who are preaching experimentation and all this other stuff — college-educated women have a much smaller chance of being divorced right now than ever before. College-educated people have very stable relationships.
This is the thing that drives me nuts. It’s like you —
Rosen: It’s hypocrisy. It seems like a kind of hypocrisy.
Liu: It’s class hypocrisy, but it’s actually creating a culture war that attacks working-class people. That’s the thing that really rankles me.
Now the country club Republicans of Orange County today are more like very wealthy small-business people. They’re much more upstarts. I have a lot of friends who I love who are Republicans. They have experienced extreme class mobility in their lifetimes, but they have not gone to college.
Rosen: That’s unusual now.
Liu: Yeah. So this is a very interesting configuration for me because even though there are many women who I play tennis with who may not have millions — they have the college credential, and that actually determines their political positions.
They feel like they’re really enlightened. But I feel like both sides are completely captured by different forms of propaganda.
Rosen: This is a good segue into talking a little bit about the midterm voting.
We’ve seen that the Democratic Party tends to get wealthier, more college-educated people now. That coalition has almost flipped from people who used to vote for Republicans.
But I think the material situation of the average American was what was front and center — the cost of groceries, the cost of gas, the cost of housing — and also a little bit about government corruption.
I’ll say, from the conservative side of the aisle, it seemed like a rewind back to the 2024 culture war playbook for most of the Republican candidates. A lot of them avoided talking about these economic issues, with a few exceptions.
The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, after the midterm elections, chastised Republicans.
Who in the most recent elections do you think avoided the trauma script trap and instead talked about these issues well while still getting the voters to listen to them? Because that is why this is so appealing to people.
Liu: I think James Talarico did a great job. I actually think Angie Nixon did a great job. She lost in Florida. I think that Gina Hinojosa did a great job of avoiding culture war language and talking about the struggles of Texans.
I think that there is a huge anti-authoritarian backlash against this kind of condescension that now comes from the right. I just turned on Fox News this morning, and Sean Hannity was making fun of Rosie O’Donnell. He was talking about something that nobody cares about anymore, about how she left the country because she hated Trump. He’s trying to revive culture wars because it’s the only script he knows.
Making fun of liberal trauma, liberal snowflakes — nobody cares about that anymore. Everyone should be focused and is focused on the questions of the day, which are economic and which have to do with corruption and just the absolute illegality that the Trump administration is performing, in defiance of small-r republican values, which should be values that we’re trying to figure out how to instantiate to fight against the oligarchs.
He got into bed with the oligarchs. There was something about him being like, “I’m against forever wars, and I’m going to drain the swamp,” that Americans responded to then. And he’s betrayed all of those kinds of promises that he made to actually get rid of corruption and waste. He’s upped corruption and waste.
I feel like there is a focus on bread-and-butter focus that Zohran Mamdani was capable of, that Bernie Sanders continued to emphasize. It sounds so boring to keep talking about bread and butter, but bread and butter is a problem right now.
Child care as well. The pronatalist conservatives had no economic plan for how to help young people establish families and take care of their children.
Rosen: It was interesting. There was a lot of rhetoric, repeating of plans and encouraging people to have more children. But then when policy came to it — and this is policy at a time when the Republicans did control Congress — there wasn’t much movement.
I do want to posit a candidate who maybe tried to have it both ways. El-Sayed certainly talked a lot about prescription drug pricing. Those were his ads all over Michigan. It’s probably a large part of the reason he won, that he was really emphasizing those economic conditions.
But he would sit down and do interviews, and he would talk about things like speaking truth to pain and people being in their trauma.
So is he an example of someone trying to square the circle that you’ve described?
Liu: I think a lot of younger people like him grew up in this world. It’s hard for them to transition to another language.
My colleagues in faculty meetings are like: We’re speaking truth to power.
And I’m like: Where is the power in this room? We’re trying to get enough resources to teach our students properly.
But it’s this default position that he takes on.
What I liked about his campaign is that he was combative. I feel like a lot of Democratic politicians, up until this year, look like they were made in a vat, like they were cloned. And I feel like there’s a place for spontaneity and there’s a place for combativeness that feels authentic for people.
Rosen: “Authentic” — I’m glad you brought that word up. That’s a question I have for you.I mean, love him or hate him, people saw Trump as authentically himself in every ——
Liu: One hundred percent.
Rosen: Yes. And one thing he never did is cosplay being working class. A lot of the candidates who didn’t do well on the Democratic side of the aisle would often cosplay authenticity. It’s like: I’m putting on a flannel. I’m going hunting.
Liu: I disagree, I disagree.
Rosen: Well, I’m curious to hear: Where do you see authenticity on the left side of the aisle being done well, and where are your concerns that maybe it might turn off voters who see them as being inauthentic?
Liu: OK. Well, first, I think Donald Trump did cosplay being working class because he’d put on his construction hat during successful campaigns and be like: [imitating Trump] I built things. I know how these guys talk.
Rosen: But he still had his suit on.
Liu: I know, I know. But he’s like: [imitating Trump] None of these people know how to talk to the working ….
I’m from New York. I’ve listened to that guy my whole life. And he was unvarnished. He’s like: [imitating Trump] I talk. I’m vulgar. I talk like this. I make things. I like things. I like McDonald’s. I like gold.
Rosen: But that connects to some voters.
Liu: I know.
Rosen: A lot of voters like that.
Liu: But that’s part of his identity as someone who grew up in construction in New York. And construction is very tied to Mafia, very tied to working class, very tied to unions that were tied to the Mafia.
And it’s a whole world that doesn’t really exist anywhere else. Maybe in Chicago. Like, where you have billionaire elites every day talking to their construction guys and they share this low culture that PMC people, like from my class, hate.
Rosen: And look down upon.
Liu: Right. “It’s so gold. He’s so vulgar.”
Rosen: It’s seen as tacky.
Liu: Yeah, and I actually think working-class people hated the professional managerial class so much, they were like: Oh, they hate him for being vulgar. They would hate me, too, because I like my tchotchkes and my brocade drapes, like him.
So I think he played that very well. I don’t know that it’s being inauthentic. I think he has very vulgar tastes, and he stood by them. He didn’t try to be anything else. He didn’t try to be WASPy. He didn’t try to be New England.
So Sanders is the same way. There’s a tristate-area thing that has to do with a local accent, being very much from a place ——
Rosen: Which are disappearing, actually.
Liu: Exactly.
Rosen: It’s becoming almost exotic to hear a national figure like that.
Liu: If I’m very, very tired, [switches to a New York accent] I can talk like this all day long.
Rosen: You’re bringing it to this podcast! I appreciate that.
Liu: I don’t like to talk like this all day long, but I could talk like this all day long.
[Switches back.] I had to literally get rid of my New York accent when I went to college, because I realized that people were not taking me seriously if I did.
So the kinds of cosplaying that you’re talking about, I don’t know if you have any examples, because I can’t think of anyone —
Rosen: Graham Platner.
Liu: Oh, yeah.
Rosen: [Chuckles.] I’m sorry, I had to bring it up. But again, someone who probably, perhaps if not crowded by political consultants, would’ve done it differently. I mean, he had a lot of other issues as well.
But I think you’re pointing to something that’s really difficult for American political culture in general, and that’s to even talk about class.
Liu: I know.
Rosen: You lost your accent because it marked you as a different class than the people you might be with in college. And authenticity, people pretend at it in order to separate themselves, perhaps, from their origins, whether those origins, now in an anti-elite culture, might be wealthy origins. You don’t want to be seen as a wealthy elite.
I’m curious: Where do you see this class-based kind of lens helping us here in determining future political culture?
Liu: I’m often attacked for being a professor, very privileged, and why should I talk about the working class?
I’m not assuming the voice of the working class. I’m looking at the objective material situation of American working-class people, and I think it’s because of my leftist materialist commitments that I see these things as the most important thing possible.
Fifty percent of Americans don’t even vote. They don’t participate in the electoral process, partially because they’re so alienated, partially because they’re under a lot of economic stress. They don’t have time to read the newspapers. They’re raising their children. They’re trying to put food on the table. They’re not well physically.
They don’t feel part of the polity. I feel like that is a terrible tragedy, and this is my objective assessment of the situation that the majority of Americans don’t see their interests represented by both parties.
Whether or not that’s inauthentic, I don’t care. It’s objective. It’s materialist. And I see the professional managerial class, my class, looking down on people like that, ignoring the interests of people like that. In these elections, maybe they’ve turned a corner.
I feel like it’s perfectly fine to be a class traitor. Class is not an identity; it’s a relationship to the means of production. I’m a classic Marxist on this. I see people using “working class” now as an identity. “Well, as a working-class person ….”
It’s like, no. A class analysis is against the “as a.” We are looking at the whole picture. We are looking at about 65 percent of Americans who are having problems putting food on the table.
Rosen: Let’s pause for a moment on that. As a conservative, I would push back a little bit on that purely materialistic class worldview.
I think that misses something. I think it misses some of the spiritual and social crises that we’re going through. Even if all of the economic conditions improved for the working class, people might still experience a crisis of meaning and feelings of anxiety that the class framing really can’t capture.
We hear a lot about the loneliness epidemic, isolation, the fact that people are not spending as much time in each other’s company. Those things might not be solvable by fixing all the economic issues. And the trauma scripts, in part, are probably filling some of that void.
So if the trauma scripts are bad for us — which I think you argue persuasively they are — what should replace them?
Liu: I agree that there’s a question of meaninglessness and isolation. I think we need more infrastructural support to create better social lives.
We are a secularizing society. The church and the community, the local newspapers, clubs, like in Robert Putnam’s
Rosen:“Bowling Alone.”
Liu Membership in all of those things is declining. In place of it, we have the time suck of the smartphone.
I feel like there should be a deep sense of commitment in creating community centers — small, locally based, maybe federally funded places where people can feel like they can get a good meal, they can read a book, they can see free film. I really believe in cultural enrichment that comes through building out infrastructure like this.
I also feel like one of the things that isolates people is the feeling of not having any money. I saw a really interesting statistic about how we’re just entertaining less at home.
Rosen: Yes. Fewer dinner parties, fewer gatherings.
Liu: Yeah. It takes a lot of money to put together a dinner.
Rosen: That’s true.
Liu: And for poor people or working-class people, there’s a lot of shame about the home. I lived that in an immigrant family.
We need these third spaces. And here maybe I do agree that I think that there is a really important spiritual function of these third spaces, because they allow us to be in neither high-stakes public venues nor perfectly private venues. A third space provides a kind of in-real-life space of communion with the other.
That’s very difficult, because when you actually have to face other people, they often disagree with you. They’re not easy to handle. It’s much easier to go on your phone and create that substitute. So I actually believe that we can provide infrastructural spaces of meaning.
You know what? A well-functioning senior center, community center, actually is an incredible thing to see. My parents were involved in this before they passed away, in Westchester County. There were often community-based spaces. There were classes. They had a really incredible social life because of the senior centers in Westchester County.
I think we should go back to some of that model for people who don’t want to go to church or who aren’t comfortable with religious belief but to have community centers that are noncommercialized social spaces.
Rosen: This is another point, I think, of agreement on the right and the left, in that the crisis of social connection is going to force us to come up with more creative solutions.
I am also a fan of third places, especially the ones that you don’t have to pay to use. And, especially for younger people who don’t want to pay $12 for a coffee to sit and talk to their friends in a place that feels kind of like a WeWork. There’s definitely a motivation for that.
We might — in fact, I’m sure we disagree on federal funding being the answer. Those are longstanding debates. But we are still a religious country, far more than many others, and churches in those communities do provide that infrastructure.
What other institutions would you think, besides the federal government and the churches, would you perhaps see as a pathway to helping in that situation?
Liu: I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, because I had this long debate with one of my friends about how we could actually leverage the parish system — a secular kind of parish system — where a lot of social services would be integrated into one space. You could have child care, you could have free meals and not necessarily base it on any particular religion.
I do think public funding does come into play to decommercialize these things. I think that philanthropy is very limited as a source, and also, the philanthropists and the NGOs — you and I probably agree with this — they all have their own agendas.
I think a neutral funding source would probably be better, but maybe federal funding distributed across states that had a lot of determination about how they would spend it.
Rosen: I’m curious then — Some of the reason I’m pushing you on the crisis of meaning and the spiritual issues is that our politics have shown a real demoralization, in the sense that some of the most transcendent things you see political actors on both sides do is express contempt for their opponents. Empathy is seen as weakness.
Where does your critique of trauma politics fit into that sort of politics? Which, I’m sad to say, a lot of people enjoy consuming as entertainment and, for some, is almost a secular faith.
Liu: You mean the contempt or the ——
Rosen: The contempt. So where do you see trauma politics exacerbating that tendency? Or if we abandon trauma politics, will we see less of this contempt and lack of empathy in the political space? Is it just human nature?
Liu: No, I think that’s a really interesting question, because I think that part of that contempt culture has to do with the fact that trauma culture has created theaters of false empathy.
This is where I would go back to more of a Stoicist position, where we keep empathy to the people we know in real life or to the caring institutions where it should be encouraged and instantiated and we keep it out of politics.
I’ll give you an example of the failed institutionalization of empathy that I think actually produced more alienation.
My mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 stomach cancer, and we were at Mount Sinai with the social worker and the oncologist for the delivery of the worst news. We’re there trying to face the situation.
Rosen: It’s horrible.
Liu: My mother’s completely clearheaded, right? We’re in this office, the oncologist is there, and the young social worker starts to testify to what she sees and what she’s feeling about the whole situation.
Rosen: Her feelings?
Liu: Yes.
Rosen: Not yours and your mother’s and ——
Liu: No, there is: Oh, I can’t believe how much love there is in this room.
And I was just like: Oh, my God, someone taught you to say this in your training manual, and you are rehearsing this for us, and you are not letting us have our feelings. You are making us look at you having your feelings.
This kind of theater of empathy is in almost all of the liberal institutions and in the media, too. And it’s created a lot of hypocrisy, a lot of alienation.
I think we have to demand of our institutions, including the universities and the media, a more authentic and higher standard of communication with regard to the proper uses of empathy.
You know, NPR has this music or a background noise it plays when something terrible is happening.
Rosen: Cue the violins.
Liu: Yeah, it’s really, really canned. The New York Times does this, too, when it covers Africa. There’s so much going on in Africa. It’s a vibrant continent with a lot of complexity, but it’s disaster porn for the global south.
We have empathy exhaustion in these public media situations, and we should actually have a more disciplined idea of time and place for these kinds of things, and so we don’t get this contempt and disdain and demonization of the other that seems to have a lot of currency on social media and media in general.
Rosen: That is a point where, from the conservative side of the aisle, the everyday practice of the virtues — again, an old-timey-sounding thing — you have to practice these things in order to do them well, versus performing them, which often I think people then feel manipulated by what they see.
That’s where I think your critique of trauma politics is extremely useful. Somehow we’ve gotten to a point where our politicians have learned the lesson that that kind of manipulation is effective.
As we think about what’s happened with the midterms and looking ahead, do you think we’re going to be able to have some political leadership, regardless of which side of the aisle it comes from, that will learn that lesson and move us to the next phase? And what do you think that next phase, the post-trauma-politics age, might look like?
Liu: I would hope that we would be able to have a more cleareyed view of the social whole, of the country as a whole. And I would, as a professor, advocate for a deeper understanding of our history and a deeper understanding of where we came from, where things are.
There’s a contempt for history on both sides of the aisle. The conservatives want to say that the Constitution is this ahistorical thing. The Constitution was forged in a time of violence and conflict, and that time of violence and conflict has changed, and we can look at other documents. It’s not a sacred text.
The liberals and leftists want to say that the past was just full of benighted people who had biases that we have to correct.
Both of these do a great discredit to the struggles of the past, because we’ve also achieved a lot as a country.
I’ve spent a lot of time out of America recently, and whenever I come home, I’m like: Oh, my God, I love this country.
Rosen: Gratitude. It’s underappreciated thing.
Liu: We have this beautiful openness and warmth with strangers, and I think it’s very unique to our democratic culture — small d.
And I feel like we can look at the horrible mistakes and terrible things that we did in the past and also appreciate and build on the good things that happened.
Rosen: Catherine Liu, thanks for joining us.
Liu: Thanks. This was a great conversation.
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