On Empathy, Citizen Responsibility, Imagination, and Freedom

I focused on the need for a deliberative citizenry in my last Tidings and continue here to reflect on basic questions of democratic self-governance.¹ I view doing so as an essential responsibility for the Institute and for me as its director during a politically and socially fraught time in the United States. As for deliberation, it is surely not the case that all residents of the United States must be policy wonks, but it just as certainly is the case that all must, across time, prove prudent in their choices and zealous in their interest in preserving their own and their fellow citizen’s rights and freedoms if all are to continue to enjoy those privileges. Likewise, in the United States at any rate, they must play that arbitrating role in a polity characterized by marked diversity. All that unites residents of this country are the principles set forth in our nation’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution. We do not share one faith, national origin, common race, ethnicity or tribe. We are instead a polyglot bunch in such terms who are gathered as one only in so far as we are all human beings and deserving of dignity on that basis and willing to embrace the rule of law, freedom and equal rights for all our number. This is surely not a new challenge for this nation or for democratic self-governance as a premise, for that matter. But it is a profound responsibility for our citizenry, and it requires at least two sorts of responses.

        On the one hand, it demands political leaders willing to press their fellow citizens to discipline their fears, greed, jealousy, lust for power and hatreds and to call on them likewise to demonstrate compassion and empathy as well as openness to all. In my last Tidings, I focused on the example of Thoedore Roosevelt as such a leader for his time. Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Barack Obama provide examples of other such modern U.S. leaders. The role, most basically, of these individuals is to call on the better natures of their fellow citizens in the quest for an ever more robust democracy for all.

        On the other hand, as I emphasize above, democratic self-governance requires much of citizens too, who must discipline themselves and see beyond their immediate worlds to what joins them with other Americans and, indeed, to grasp that their common humanity unites them with peoples across the world. These imperatives are joined at the hip, and each requires that citizens practice empathy, which my dictionary defines as, “The power of mentally identifying oneself with (and so fully comprehending) a person or object of contemplation.”² In turn, it is impossible to identify with another when those perceptions are governed not by openness but by fear, racism, vitriol or hatreds of whatever sort. In short, empathy demands that individuals be able, and just as importantly, be willing, to imagine beyond themselves, rather than to fear difference or scapegoat and vilify others out of cruelty, ignorance or spite.

        I found myself thinking of these matters when I saw recently that Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss had died in London on January 3, 2026, at 96.³ She was the stepsister by marriage of Anne Frank and knew Frank as a friend before her family and Frank’s each went into hiding in Amsterdam in 1942. When Schloss and her family were betrayed in 1944, they were sent to Auschwitz, her father and brother died in the camp while she and her mother survived. Meanwhile, Anne and her sister Margot died (likely of typhus) at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February of 1945 following their transfer there from Auschwitz in late 1944. Left behind in Poland at Auschwitz, Anne and Margot’s mother died there, but their father survived until the camp was liberated. Schloss’s mother became reacquainted with Otto Frank, Anne’s father, following the war and the two married, making Eva Anne’s stepsister (albeit posthumously) by marriage.

        Schloss’s life matters because it illustrates how vitally important it is to have civic as well as political leaders remind citizens of the profound need for empathy and curiosity to prevent the triumph of the murderous possibilities represented by the Holocaust. Schloss became an indefatigable educator about the horrors of the Shoah. She also co-founded the Anne Frank Trust UK (she lived in London) aimed at helping young people challenge prejudice and scapegoating fears and hatreds. King Charles, who worked with Ms. Schloss recalled her this way:

The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend and yet she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding and resilience through their tireless work for the Anne Frank Trust UK and for Holocaust education across the world.⁴

        King Charles had it just right, Schloss and others like her are vital, as are political leaders who realize how crucial it is to remind their fellow citizens of history’s lessons of the costs for freedom of empty quest for power, and of hatred, including racism, chauvinism, sexism and fear. Even as Schloss sought for much of her life to remind all who would listen of the depths of human depravity she endured in the Holocaust and to encourage habits of mind and heart to prevent those ever gaining salience again, other political and civic leaders in Europe and elsewhere have, in recent decades and to increasing audiences, preached exactly the same sorts of hatreds and scapegoating that characterized and fueled that period of human bellicosity, cruelty and madness.

        Paradoxically, as those individuals make clear, while citizens in any free self-governing regime must be given the right to make decisions, there can be no doubt that many would-be leaders and despots will seek to influence citizens via the invocation of hatreds and fears to support their own ends as they seek to obtain riches or power or both. In doing so, history suggests, they care nothing about the costs for the freedom or civil and human rights of those they malign or, in fact, for their supporters. The question in such circumstances is not merely how many citizens are willing to bend their knee to such malevolence and to cede their appropriate sovereign role in so doing on whatever grounds, but as, or more significantly, how many are willing actively to push back when such situations arise, as is happening in the United States today, to preserve their birthright against such usurpations. Doing so requires deliberation, imagination and a disciplined commitment to principles beyond self and, indeed, to people one may never encounter. Standing up for freedom in such terms is never easy but then, self-governance amidst heterogeneity is innately challenging. That fact does not make it, or the freedom it provides less significant. Citizens in the U.S. today would do well to keep these basic concerns in mind as they see their President declare himself beyond all accountability, even to the rule of law, as he also daily preaches hatred against a share of their fellow Americans and others around the globe.⁵

Notes

¹ Stephenson, Max Jr. “Highlighting Deliberative Popular Sovereignty: A Central Valence of Democratic Politics and Freedom,” Tidings, October 18, 2025, https://shorturl.at/0LYqj, Accessed January 8, 2026.

² “Empathy,” The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 808.

³ Gross, Jenny. “Eva Schloss, Anne Frank’s Stepsister and Holocaust Survivor, Dies at 96,” The New York Times, January 5, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/world/europe/eva-schloss-dead.html, Accessed January 5, 2026. 

⁴ King Charles, “A Message from the King Following the Death of Auschwitz Survivor, Eva Schloss,” X, January 4, 2026, https://x.com/RoyalFamily/status/2007845863364964404?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet, Accessed January 5, 2026. 

⁵ Cullen, Matthew, “Trump Said his Global Power was Limited Only by his ‘Own Morality,’” The New York Times, January 8, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/briefing/trump-interview-oval-office-apple-ceo.html, Accessed January 8, 2026.