In response to recently newfound liberal sympathy for the white working class upon Trump's ascension to the presidency, TheNew York Magazinecolumnist Frank Rich recently published anarticle书名是《不同情乡巴佬》里奇的基本观点是，我们应该欣然接受这样一个事实，即特朗普政府最近提出的政策建议似乎将深深伤害那些最初投票支持这些可能性的选民。所有这些都让他们明白，只有让他们遭受痛苦，比如失去医疗保健，他们才能吸取教训。用里奇的话说，如果特朗普的政府“撞上冰山，让他的基地困在美国的掌舵上，没有救生艇，那些幸存下来的人可能最终会准备好冲破自己的泡沫，倾听另一种选择。”

With this view, Rich finds himself aligned with theNational Reviewanti-Trump writer Kevin Williamson, who once wrote that, "The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible." Rich chimes in with agreement, "ifNational Reviewsays that their towns deserve to die, who are Democrats to stand in the way of Trump voters who used their ballots to commit assisted suicide?"

But, as Clio Chang ofJacobinrightly asks, is this not just unadulterated cruelty as political strategy? Chang conceptualizes this as an "empathy gap" that derives from a childish political spitefulness that is actually in the end counteproductive to the betterment of society. As Chang puts it, "VerboseNew Yorkmagazine essays notwithstanding, you can't win people over by browbeating them or shrugging at their continued descent into material deprivation." After all, if those on the leftactually认为某些机构服务，如医疗保健，是一项人权，这些权利延伸到Rich想象中的"乡巴佬"。如果我们把他们排除在外，认为他们应该在没有医疗保障的情况下进行政治选择，那么我们就不相信这是一种权利。

一个公正的社会秩序如果要实现的话，就必须依赖于不受政治党派限制的同理心。在Chang雄辩的措辞中，“我们必须为一种社会秩序而奋斗，这种社会秩序不依赖于政治精英的同情心——在这种社会中，人们获得利益不是因为他们有同情心，而是因为他们是人;在那里，医疗保健不被视为人们必须在网上乞讨的商品，而是每个人与生俱来的权利。"

So long as there is an empathy gap, in which it becomes easy to abandon entire subsets of our population, it's hard to believe that we believe in rights at all.