The toxic empathy of the VP debate There's a vacuum at the heart of American power

For all Vance’s porcelain poise, in contrast to Walz’s near hysteria, Vance stumbled in the opposite direction, toward a sort of Ivy-League passive-aggressive self-consciousness about his manners. He suddenly turned ingratiating toward his opponent, whom he had been maligning on the campaign trail for months. Walz: “I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate, and I think there was a lot of commonality here.” Vance: “Me too, man.”

The sudden lurch from campaign-hustings vitriol to two playground adversaries making nice in the principal’s office should not have been a surprise. What used to be called “woke”, and now is a treacly national style, is really nothing more than a super-Darwinian society adapting to ever more virulent forms of competition and one-upmanship by turning the display of virtue — in this case, a fireworks display of reasonableness and respect — into a lethal social weapon.

Or to couch it in psychological terms, it is the political form of narcissistic mirroring. That occurs when someone who is unable to relate to another person on an intuitive, emotional level simply reflects back to the other person the latter’s own identity. Since such mirroring is the result of calculation rather than connection, it usually masks intense hostility, even hatred. This is why, in America for the past couple of decades, “empathy” has become sort of a celebrity emotion, as opposed to sympathy. If you feel sympathy toward someone, you both understand them and feel concern for them. Being empathetic is merely knowing how to impersonate someone. Last night, Walz and Vance oozed toxic empathy.

And yet, such a mental process might well represent a glimmer of hope for a divided country. Politicians on each side live a double life. They feed their egos by roaring out to their followers just what they want to hear. But once on the national stage, the moment their opponent’s position becomes more popular than theirs, they assimilate it, no matter how much at odds it is with the sentiments they display to the faithful. After all, the faithful will understand. They do the same thing every day themselves. And there was Vance, right after the debate ended, rushing over to shake Walz’s hand just as Harris had rushed over to Trump to shake his hand right before their debate had started, thus establishing her dominance and authority.

Both candidates said they had much in common with each other so many times that you wondered whether the country was divided at all. Since running mates are famously assigned the role of Shakespearean assassin — you know what to do, just don’t tell me you did it — you wondered if this was simply a failure of nerve on the part of both men, a sudden surrender to the pious illusions of self-effacing harmony that seem to be the only glue, sanctimonious as it is, holding American society together.

But the phoney bonhomie was really a strategy shared, oddly, by both campaigns. Not in recent memory has the country been offered a choice between, in Harris, a vapid mediocrity, and in Trump, an unbalanced malignity. And not in recent memory have the running mates of the two presidential candidates been clearly more qualified than the latter — though barely so — to sit in the White House  The only difference between them is that Vance lies and gets away with it and Walz lies and gets caught. A bravura performance by either man would have only put the profoundly flawed tops of their tickets into greater relief.

One thing is for sure. If it turns out that Walz was telling another lie when he said that his son witnessed a shooting at a community center — Vance’s ears perked up at a possible opportunity before he quickly faked caring and concern — then he is finished as a viable vice-presidential candidate. Yet it would hardly matter. The debate began with a question posed by the moderators: Iran is two weeks away from making a nuclear bomb. Would you support an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear reactors? Neither Walz nor Vance answered the question. The tragedy in the pathetic comedy of last night was this anti-debate’s revelation of the vacuum at the heart of American power, and of the country’s growing helplessness to protect itself as history rushes to fill it.