Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg expressed some empathetic leanings toward Trump voters. “You saw a lot of people… who were really angry at the system,” Buttigieg said. “The system really had let them down.”

I can’t agree that Buttigieg is showing empathy.

First: he’s wrong; the ‘system that had really let them down’ is one they created and even if it wasn’t there is no universe in which the answer to that problem is spelled ‘Donald Trump.’

Second Buttigieg, like Sanders, is genuflecting towards anger as a political force, which is playing on Trumps turf… because the anger is invalid. Even if the anger were not invalid it would not be adequate to inform a decision. It never is.

Empathy requires us to see ourselves in them: where we make mistakes and suffer the consequences; recognize all the times we ourselves have done stupid stuff out of an unrighteous anger; recognize that if we win, they win also…. That’s empathy. Buttigieg is, in fact, showing sympathy which, as a dear friend is wont to say, ‘Sympathy lies between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.’