Empathy is a word fraught with peril: use it at your own risk. Whatever the word’s original definition was supposed to be, with the rise of wokeness, empathy became the same as sympathy except the receiving party gets to decide how much, which gives them control; you may have sympathy for the plight of others but they get to dictate how you must respond. This is not the original understanding of empathy at all; it wasn’t sympathy, it was understanding, but to recognize this, you have to have self-awareness, something the Left isn’t capable of due to mental illness, malevolence, ignorance or stupidity.
The real meaning of empathy is: if you empathize with someone, you should be able to understand their point of view, something the Left does not and apparently cannot do towards the Right, though many on the Right understand the motivations & grievances of the Left, and sincerely want to offer solutions. For example, the plight of Gen Z of not being able to be as well off as their parents: most of the Right would truly like to change the forces that caused that to happen. The Right would like to help people with mental illness because they empathize with the pain of the sufferer, but the selfish Left instead wants to validate mental illness. The Right recognizes the perverse incentives that keep Blacks poor and on state assistance. Real empathy is not virtue signaling by claiming altruistic goals but instead acting on them.
