an empathetic leap

on the occasion of the new york premiere of 'emergency shelter intake form,' some thoughts on inequality, class, polarization, and imagination

“The universe, which is not merely the stars and the moon and the planets, flowers, grass and trees, but other people, has evolved no terms for your existence, has made no room for you, and if love will not swing wide the gates, no other power will or can. And if one despairs—as who has not?—of human love, God's love alone is left.”

— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

This Thursday, emergency shelter intake form has its New York premiere at Trinity Church Wall Street. The concert is free and open to the public; reservations are recommended, and can be made here. It’s been seven years since I began work on the piece, and with that distance, I’m able to comprehend the extent to which researching and writing it radicalized my politics. 

At its core, emergency shelter seeks to shrink the psychic distance between those who take housing for granted, and those who don’t. It is meant to remind us that a society which routinely kneecaps its own social safety net is one in which we might someday find ourselves deciding between paying the gas bill or filling a prescription for a life-saving medicine, or portioning food to make it last longer, or tripling the length of a commute because we can’t afford to make a repair on our car. You, reading this, may have already been faced with one or more of these decisions.

Even among well-intentioned liberals, misunderstandings about the texture and causes of homelessness persist. First and foremost, there is the belief that the unhoused population seen on the street—often those struggling with mental illness or substance abuse—are representative of all those experiencing homelessness. In fact, the vast majority of those deemed homeless are invisible to us: they are living in shelters, in motels, in their cars, doubled up with family or friends. For many, lack of housing is inextricably linked to an economy engineered to punish working-class and poor people, while further enriching the already wealthy. As economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton argued in their essential book, Deaths of Despair, ours is a far cry from a “free market” economy, inasmuch as we have enshrined inequality into the laws that govern housing, financial instruments, and taxation. It’s a perverted form of capitalism in which the visible hand of government makes the wealthy wealthier, while the poor, working-class, and increasingly marginal middle-class, are left to do their best to get by. 

One night in February of 2018, I cooked a pot of ragù and brought it to a shelter in midtown Manhattan, where, as I strained pasta in the kitchen of a dingy church basement, a man appeared and began making sandwiches. He wanted me to know that he had every intention of eating what I’d cooked; he was just making his lunch for the next day’s shift at a construction site, where he worked forty hours a week. And he wasn’t an outlier. Some fifty percent of the guys I met at the shelter were employed, half of whom were working full time.  On the one hand, this boggles the mind. On the other, it is entirely predictable given our society’s unwillingness to prioritize affordable housing and living wages.

In this sense, homelessness is a canary in the coal mine of a society that uses outdated metrics to assess the health of its economy. The poverty rate is still calculated by a largely outdated formula pegged to the percentage of income spent on food, while neglecting to account for ballooning housing costs. Meanwhile, the gap between poverty wages and rent is staggering. 

From the chart above, one can see that two parents working forty hours a week at minimum wage jobs are, in many regions of the country, unable to afford a two- or even one-bedroom apartment. Sure, the unemployment rate is low, but what’s a job if you can’t afford a home?

And it’s not just the poorest Americans. An oft-quoted statistic from the pre-pandemic era that found 40% of Americans unable to cover a hypothetical $400 emergency has dipped only slightly in 2024, to 37%. Housing costs, in conjunction with an increasingly shoddy social safety net, have placed millions of American in a state of constant precarity, even as the stock market soars. 

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I offer all of this as prelude. For the better part of a decade, many liberals have clung to the narrative that Donald Trump’s support derives largely if not exclusively from the ineluctable racism/sexism/bigotry of white America. Never mind that assigning fixed traits based on heritage is a core feature of racism, the very evil that liberals rightly wish to cure. Never mind, too, that Black and Latino voters have been fleeing the Democratic Party at a fairly consistent pace since Obama’s re-election in 2012. 

To be clear, a disturbingly significant portion of the GOP base seems animated by racial animus, by sexism, by the desire to return to some revanchist era in which white men worked, women stayed home, queer folk lived in the shadows, and people of color were legally relegated to second-tier citizenship. Moreover, I understand how easy it is to witness Trump’s bile-filled rhetoric and arrive at the conclusion that, surely, anyone who supports him is, by proxy, an unapologetic bigot. 

But rather than continuing to reflexively lambast Trump’s supporters as being monolithically racist, liberals might do well to ask “what has the Democratic Party done to alienate the working class?” Over the last half century, neoliberalism has sorted those who live in Western democracies into winners and losers, the former tending to be elite college-educated knowledge workers, the latter being those in the trades and manufacturing, sidelined by deindustrialization, weakened unions, and globalization.

There are few charts that better distill this inequitable sorting than the one above, which demonstrates the forty-year decline of real wages among those without a college degree, at the same time that wages for those with a degree have increased. And while this alone cannot explain the rise of nativist and reactionary right-wing populism, it oughtn’t be ignored or dismissed, as Chuck Schumer did back in 2016, when he argued that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” 

Here was the quiet part out loud: the most powerful Democrat in Congress acknowledging that the party was willing to sacrifice its standing as the party of the working class in order to become the party of white collar professionals. Given this, is it any wonder that working people are fleeing the Democratic Party?  

What I find irksome is the fatalism and certainty among a certain set of (often extremely online) liberals who presume to understand the beliefs and behaviors of those they do not know, to sort them into a cartoonish monolith of bigots who derive pleasure in the oppression of others. I understand the temptation of this narrative: it allows one to sleep at night, to convince oneself of one’s own innocence, of having exclusive right to the moral high ground. But too often, this narrative justifies contempt for that oversimplified “other,” and that contempt in turn reinforces polarization, as the object of our ire feels shunned by the rhetoric of party elites, pundits, and the digital hordes. Moreover, the all-encompassing narrative fails to account for the complex and contradictory nature of human beings. 

When I traveled by train following the 2016 election, the most staunchly pro-Trump voter I encountered was a retired postmaster from the inland empire of California, a biracial man who described the experience of “driving while Black” with his darker-skinned son-in-law, and then in the next breath, expressed his frustration with the Democratic Party for taking his vote (as a person of color) for granted. He told me—without evidence—that Obama was doing more to divide the country than Trump. Then, there was a white real estate agent from the Atlanta suburbs who expressed deep discomfort with Trump and his racist rhetoric, but explained that he was a Christian, single-issue (anti-abortion) voter.  

I could make the case, as I have above, that what liberals need is to integrate class analysis into their politics. But equally necessary is an empathetic leap: to imagine those whose lived experience is as infinitely varied as it may be, to us, incomprehensible. We might envision a Pennsylvanian who grew up in a household that wasn’t particularly ideological, without the reflexive belief that the Democratic Party was “for the people;” a Michigander for whom the achievements of the civil rights era are a distant memory; an Ohioan who has seen unions gutted, vibrant main streets turned to ghost towns, nephews ID’d by beat cops as opioid overdose victims; or a West Virginian who hears the rhetoric of meritocracy and believes that those preaching its gospel see him as a loser, or worse yet, who sees himself as a loser. 

In such a context, the binary logic put forward by those who argue that “you are either a racist or an antiracist” isn’t just false but irrelevant. Indeed, the entire liberal cosmology that centers an antiracism stripped of class and cultural analysis simply does not map meaningfully onto the lives of millions of Americans.¹ 

Meanwhile, liberals are confounded by the legions who seem unperturbed by Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian ambitions. But they might consider that some thought the economy did well for them under Trump, and believe that he will leave office after four years, while others do not have time to worry about modes of governance. And then there are those so fed up with a system that has seen their prosperity plummet that they’re willing to burn it all to the ground.

To put it another way: mapping your worldview, your experience, and your ideology onto someone else, and then labeling them as racist, stupid, or ineluctably bigoted, for having failed to reach the same conclusions or belief system that you hold, says more about the limits of your self-awareness, curiosity, and capacity for grace, than it does about the person you’ve judged. More than that, it’s a terrible way to build political strength. 

But what about those instances in which we face someone who actively delights in bigotry? These days, one often hears the refrain, “why should I extend humanity to those who would deny me mine?” On the surface, it’s a powerful riposte. Yet there are at least two reasons to be skeptical. First, as I’ve argued above, there is no monolith on the other side of the political divide. Second, and perhaps more important, is the ethical lapse contained within this ultimately hollow maxim. As Dr. Martin Luther King advised in a 1963 sermon, “with every ounce of our energy we must continue to rid this nation of the incubus of segregation. But we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love. While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist.”

In my view, it is precisely the absence of love in our politics that prevents us from building effective political coalitions. As Dr. King argued elsewhere, the path toward the beloved community must be paved with the same values we wish to see manifest in the society we long to create. The notion that it is acceptable to dehumanize one’s ideological foe while building a world in which all are loved and cherished equally was a non-starter for Dr. King, and it should be for us as well.   

This is tough medicine to swallow at a time when our politics is as vile as it is. But we should remember that it was worse still in King’s era. And clearly, the battering ram of hubris, contempt, and moral certainty, has not broken the dam of polarization and dysfunctional governance. Infusing our daily lives with an ethic of love is, in my estimation, the single most difficult and yet honorable practice to which we can devote ourselves. And, after all, what else is there? 

1. It is worth mentioning that the tendency to treat racism as a psychological defect, rather than as an instrument of capital, inextricably linked to class, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Touré Reed’s book Toward Freedom offers an excellent and concise history of the ways in which McCarthyism beat socialism out of left-wing movements, replacing it with a defanged understanding of racism that sidelined its fundamental utility as a tool to divide working people who might otherwise be allies.