Jane Fonda’s Profound Empathy for Trump

Jane Fonda’s Profound Empathy for Trumpby Rev. John McFadden

Jane Fonda expressed profound empathy for Trump and his militant supporters. But she didn’t know it could be used to help transform America. She could learn that, on a small scale, enlightening transformations of even vicious White Nationals are happening. Then she could begin to see that these efforts, when coupled with professionals’ down-to-earth empathetic insights, could help her realize her hopes for America.

Fonda was quoted in Politico, saying:
“I hate what he [Donald J. Trump] stands for, what he does, what he says — I don’t hate him. …. I feel that I understand a little bit—this is a man who was traumatized as a child by his father, who had a mother that didn’t protect him. And the behavior is the language of the wounded. You have to have empathy for him as a human being, while you hate what he does, And I think that that has to also transfer to the people who voted for him.”

In so saying, she empathetically explained this destructive person, which is what profound empathy does. It says, “You don’t deserve to feel guilty and humiliated, because you were in the grip of demeaning influences you knew nothing about.”
Every progressive I told about this quote protested, saying, “But Trump and his minions are sociopaths.” Most people believe that such destructive people don’t feel guilty and ashamed, so trying to relieve them of those feelings seems ridiculous.

But some experts, like James Gilligan, former Harvard professor and former Director of the Mental Health Division of the Massachusetts State Department of Corrections, argue that most sociopathic people’s guilt-shame is hidden, not absent. 

And as a former parole social worker, I’ve interviewed professionally diagnosed sociopaths who have, contrary to popular expectations, changed thoroughly. And the details of these transformations make the case that relief of their buried shame-guilt is the difference that made all the difference.

Former White Supremacist Christian Picciolini’s experience helps confirm this unfamiliar view. He explained his transformation saying that receiving empathy when he didn’t deserve it is what enabled him to change. Also, consider the work of Daryl Davis, an African American piano player with no social science training. He transformed an Imperial Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan just by engaging him with empathetic understandings. That Klanner left the Klan and made Davis his daughter’s godfather. Davis has accounted for at least 200 other KKK members’ defections.

Loretta Ross, an African American professor at Smith College who used to angrily condemn White Supremacists, makes the same point. She listened to the life story of a former leader of the Aryan Nation. And she came to understand him as a victim of a depressing early life and Nazi proselytizers who promised relief from feeling like a reject. After consideration, she changed her social change method from the confrontive “calling out” to the inviting “calling in.”

Based partly on the convergence of these kinds of transformations and emerging professional insights, some of us believe that this so-called “radical empathy” can transform America. But how could this method work on the national scale to which Fonda is devoting her life. She’s one of America’s most prolific and effective national activists, but in that work, she doesn’t rely on empathy. Fonda still falls back on the traditional “calling out,” or confrontation. I think that’s because she simply doesn’t know of the power and relevance of her profound empathy.

She could learn more specific empathetic ideas with which to reach troubling conservatives. For instance, there’s the idea that calling people “racist” is insulting rather than descriptive. “Racist” has come to mean “stupid,” “mean-spirited,” and worse. When speaking of so-called racists, it makes more sense to refer to them as “sincerely, understandably believing that the white race is superior to other races.” That nonjudgmental view can open the door to reconciling dialogue, as Davis discovered.

Fonda, Clinton, and other leaders could help change America by learning more about this unconditional empathy and presenting it in talk shows and speeches. For instance, they could empathetically explain both conservatives’ and progressives’ insulting views. They might say things like, “It’s understandable that some conservatives believe that blacks are inferior and that some progressives believe that conservatives are stupid and mean-spirited; their families, neighbors, and communities believe those ideas and have understandable reasons for believing them.” Daryl Davis talks that way, and it seems likely that elevating his and other change-makers’ home-grown methods to a national stage would help Americans become less alienated.

Rev. John McFadden is a Presbyterian minister. He authored, Enlightened Empathy: Relief from America’s Turmoil, and his related articles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and Tikkun.