Embracing Empathy and Responsible Power, with Dr. Claire Yorke

KEVIN MALONEY: I am very excited to welcome to the podcast today Professor Claire Yorke. She is the author of the new book Empathy in Politics and Leadership: The Key to Transforming Our World. As any of you know who listen to Council programming or follow Values & Interests we think a lot about the personal values equation, the virtues that people need to focus on, especially within their public and private lives, so I think we have an expert today on empathy. Empathy or a lack thereof has been trending in the news lately in the political world, so we are going to dig into that with Claire.

Claire, thank you so much for joining us today.

CLAIRE YORKE: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure.

KEVIN MALONEY: Listeners by now will feel tired of me teeing it up this way, but I still hope it is useful. What we like to do on the Values & Interests podcast to begin is to dig into the value system of our own guests. I am a big believer—and I think some of the empirical evidence bears this out as well—that there are not just institutions in the world or monolithic states or companies; they are made up of people who have individual value systems, and if we don’t look at those systems we are definitely leaving a door closed on understanding how these things work.

Maybe we can start there, Claire, in terms of your formation around values, and then we can pick it up and get into your professional side as well.

CLAIRE YORKE: I love that question, and it does provoke a lot of thinking on what are the most important things in our lives and how we got there. I have been reflecting on this in advance of the podcast.

I have been studying international relations for over 20 years now, and I have always been struck by how in that discipline there is a real focus on power, interests, and security, and they hold, they are important factors, but I always found that did not align with my experience growing up, to take it back to that. I found I was surrounded by family and friends who were very much of a community, who were very much about generosity and kindness.

My grandparents were doing charity work until they were well into their 90s. I once went and helped my grandmother at an old people’s home when she was older than a lot of the people she was helping, so this idea of charity, kindness, and community was something that I saw a lot growing up. It has given me maybe an optimistic view of human nature and a real belief in the importance of kindness, compassion, and understanding.

Alongside that, growing up in the Northwest of the United Kingdom, my family always emphasized the importance of equality. As I have grown older, that has also transitioned more into a belief in equity, that actually we should all have equal opportunities and we should create systems and structures where people have what they need to exist at a very basic level but also to thrive and prosper in ways that are far more meaningful than in just the material dimensions. That has informed my approach to politics and life. Empathy connects with that idea of equity because we all need different things in some ways, so how do you understand what different people need?

KEVIN MALONEY: I’m sure we’ll pull on this thread, the international relations framing that you gave at the beginning, a little more. The big question we always ask at the Council is what we think of as an “ethical realism,” concept, where, yes, it is about power and we understand that actors are going to attempt to maximize their role in the world and protect their national interests, but for open societies, for liberal democracies, there is a big outstanding question: Power, yes, power is a given, but power to what end?

Power can take many different forms. It can take a more moralistic, less responsible, more amoral, or more idealistic form. If I could get a reaction to the nuances within power and how you think about that. I think that provides a good bedrock for going into other areas of your book.

CLAIRE YORKE: That is one of the big themes of the book, this idea that we talk a lot about power, and it is often in the context of power over. A lot of the discussions we have right now around strongmen leaders and more populist politics is about ideas and concerns around domination in political spaces, the idea that there is one vision of how things can be done.

The book and my own thinking are very much about how we move to systems of power where we are co-creating solutions and where we get more people to be invested in creating power, and that also we are empowering people to have more agency as citizens so that people feel like they have more choice and opportunity to act, respond, and shape their political and social realities. I think power has these different forms. How as well do we embrace forms of resistance, forms of contests of power to understand how power itself might be refined and better serve more people?

KEVIN MALONEY: I think what we are seeing from a U.S. perspective right now is this caricature of power where it is masculine and transactional.

You bring up a very good point. There is not one definition of power. This is conceptually driven in many ways in what you attach to it. This goes to a lot of the work I am doing around narratives and their impact on geopolitics right now. There is the literal use of power in the arena of geopolitics, and then there is the battle over what power is and how it is conceived at the same time. These things I have found are happening in parallel.

It is a very distressing time, especially for people who I would say are aligned with pluralistic visions of the world, but from an international relations perspective it is also a very interesting time to be studying this area. I am sure you have found that in going into this study and writing this book on empathy.

CLAIRE YORKE: It is fascinating, and it connects with what you said there about narratives as well. How do we tell different stories about what power is and what it can do, because there is a danger of getting into very narrow loops about what power is and how it serves us, and that lacks imagination in the political space I think. It also limits the longer-term implications and impact of what is possible with politics.

I work as well in the space of strategy and strategic thinking, and I think often horizons of impact are too short, so how do we tell different stories about power that has far longer implications? What do you then start to consider? What are the questions you need to be asking in order to have power sustained in a healthier way over the longer term?

KEVIN MALONEY: I think it goes back to this idea of: “Rising tides lift all boats versus zero-sum; in order for me to gain power, you have to lose power.” The latter is a concept that has been attached to realism, but it seems from an empathy perspective that does not need to happen. There can be this rising tide lifting all boats empowering versus power-taking approach.

I was trying to read between the lines of the book and the thing that spoke to me is that there is a nuance there. It is just taking the time to get into that nuance, understand it, and then wield it politically to give an alternative.

CLAIRE YORKE: Exactly. I think it is about taking more people with us because I am also worried that when you have a system of power over it is then easy for citizens for get complacent or apathetic: What is the point of them acting? What is the point of them getting involved in politics if they have no way of shaping it? It is about how we move to new systems that say, “We can all be invested in this change,” and we actually all have to in our everyday change behaviors, show up in different ways, have opinions, have ideas, and make changes to our lives that will have implications in the longer term.

KEVIN MALONEY: I have been having a lot of conversations on the podcast in relation to the challenges that democracies are facing right now and this debate over whether there is a nihilism that is happening. You are alluding to it a bit, but in my experience in these conversations nihilism almost feels like a cop-out. It is too much of an easy prescription around citizenry or othering a group as lazy or disinterested. Maybe I can pull on that thread a little bit, because I feel like maybe there is something there around that nuance.

CLAIRE YORKE: That is something I write about in the book because when I started the book it was very much about leadership and leaders we had seen during the pandemic who had stepped up and shown empathy. It was intended to be a book about how leaders who are empathetic can transform our systems. I write about this in the preface.

But the more I observed it, I thought: Well, this lets us off the hook. If all we are doing is waiting for a leader to be empathetic, to show us the way of doing things differently and giving us a vision, it denies us, the citizens and voters, responsibility. It means we just wait passively for it to get better, but actually we are the people who are voting in politicians who are making these changes that are proving very harmful to society, who are undermining the fabric of what we think society should be, and what we think our politics could do.

We need to be taking a bit more ownership over this. Just assuming that it is out of our control and that that is just the way politics work feels like a copout, like you say.

KEVIN MALONEY: We are going to swing back to it, but I don’t want to get too far ahead because I think the listeners will get annoyed. I would like to take a step back, pause, and go back to the core concept of the book, which is empathy. Maybe for our listeners, because again this is a concept that gets personalized in people’s lives. You feel empathy, you act with empathy, but maybe from an academic perspective how do you think about and how do you define empathy, and how did that provide a framework for the book at large?

CLAIRE YORKE: There are different definitions of empathy. I define it as “an attempt to understand the experiences, perspectives, interests, and contexts of other people.” Often empathy gets divided into cognitive and affective, which is emotional, the way you innately feel understanding or you feel a strong connection to someone. I argue that it is a mixture of both, that even if you are taking a more conscious and deliberate cognitive approach to someone else’s experience and what they are going through, you also need to factor in how they are feeling about that and how those feelings shape the ways in which they interpret their circumstances, their environment, and the options and choices available to them.

Integral to empathy, the definition, is also I think self-reflection and the ability to consider what we bring to that dynamic. It is a relational construct. It is something that is between two people or between multiple people, and so we have to know what it is that we bring, how have our words, behaviors, and actions shaped the experiences or the histories of others?

Especially in the realm I deal with, which is often diplomacy and statecraft, how do people who represent the state or a large organization like a diplomat or a military officer, represent more than just themselves? If you show up as an American civil servant or as an American diplomat, you might have a very good professional relationship with someone else, you may connect with someone very easily and very effectively in another country, but you also have to be conscious of how your own country and what you represent is going to be understood and interpreted.

It has that interpretive dimension, and for me part of it is also about getting people more comfortable talking about emotions because empathy offers that lens into the emotional landscapes of people, and so often we want to imagine that rationality is neat and sterile and emotions are unquantifiable and messy, but actually we are human. They are absolutely intrinsic to how we relate to other people, connect with them, and engage with our environment.

KEVIN MALONEY: People are not the perfect stoic model 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I would say it is probably the opposite of that most of the time, so again there is a blind spot if we don’t seriously understand the emotional side and what drives people. It is super-interesting.

There are so many directions I want to go in off of this. I think the first one is thinking about this again in the realm of diplomacy. We are seeing this bifurcation right now when it comes to transactional diplomacy, corruption bubbling up from where maybe it used to be hidden, dealmaking, and a rejection of multilateral systems and reciprocity, these things that have underpinned diplomacy, albeit with many difficulties over the past 80 years.

What does the future in a diplomatic environment look like where empathy is shelved and, maybe even worse, thought of as a weakness? What does that look like? How does that end, if well at all?

CLAIRE YORKE: I’m biased. I don’t think that ends well. I think it ends with this very much deal-making diplomacy, and diplomacy is about relationships and building those lines of communication, building relations of trust and credibility, building the ability to engage with others in spaces where you can be frank, honest, and you can negotiate what is really going on under the surface. My fear is that it becomes transactional and very short-termist, that you lose the kind of long-term bonds of trust and the relations that can sustain it, that people will renege on deals when it no longer serves them, and that people will stop valuing the kinds of bilateral and multilateral agreements that they have entered into and the norms by which diplomacy is conducted. A lot of the norms of diplomacy are about respecting the office of the diplomat, respecting what they represent—communication, dialogue, and negotiation, and being able to listen and understand diverse perspectives and find ways through conflict.

If it just becomes about achieving a deal or signing a treaty without all of the substance and relations that go behind it, I think you end up with much weaker diplomacy and much weaker relations with states, which makes it harder to then achieve common and collective responses to shared problems like climate change, environmental degradation, artificial intelligence, weapon proliferation, and organized crime.

KEVIN MALONEY: Transactionalism is certainly concerning to us from a Carnegie Council perspective from individual actions all the way up to this infusion of that ethos into a diplomatic corps.

We talked recently with a group at the Council about the norms that were violated post-9/11 from a U.S. perspective around torture and being able to draw a straight line from that to the normative erosion, the permission structure, and the domino effect. This does not always tomorrow or a year or two years down the road, but these decisions to be corrupt, to be openly transactional, or to put the United Nations aside have massive impacts, again maybe not today but down the line.

Speaking with the executive director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, he was talking about the building of an international corps of civil servants that for the first time really in history were asked to put an international community at least on par with their national interests. That was a real rewiring of the diplomat, and it will be interesting to see what rewiring is required. Maybe empathy is one of the cures for that when we have to tackle this today, tomorrow, or in a few years from now. It was just an interesting point that he flagged, that being a flashpoint for diplomacy, not putting only national interest as the number-one thing to think about.

CLAIRE YORKE: Exactly. The problem is that the transactional approach can be very effective in the short term. You can get some quick wins that look like you are doing it differently, but there is a reason diplomacy has been done this way for thousands of years.

It is exactly like you say, the norms. The moment you start eroding common norms that people have invested in about how we treat each other and how we treat citizens or states and those international binding agreements that have enabled a certain level of peace and security for the most part, it becomes far more anarchical than we can manage.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is a very trying moment. We have talked about the concept of empathy, we have talked about power and maybe the influence on the diplomatic or international relations level, so I want to go down to examples. This is always a discipline. I have to always say this to myself in the mirror working at Carnegie Council: “Don’t stay in the abstract. Get down to the human level, to the policy examples.”

Maybe we can talk through some of these moral leaders, these empathetic leaders who have embraced empathy but did it in a way that was also responsible from a realist perspective. Who are those people you think about who were able to get things done politically to advance their nation’s or their community’s interests while still embracing empathy?

CLAIRE YORKE: There are a number of examples. I guess one of the very prominent ones, especially connected to that realist lens, is President Nelson Mandela of South Africa, who really centered this idea of understanding others and bridging divides as part of the way that he sought to reunite South Africa after apartheid, after a very painful history for the country. He was not immune to the challenges of that and there was a sense of interest in trying to maintain a coherent state and trying to realize the state’s interests, but bringing different people onboard and making sure that he put that into practice in who he selected and how he reflected on including the Afrikaners and including all the South Africans in the reconstruction of the country, then also in the way in which they went through a process of repair and justice as part of healing that country, which I think is a real example of empathy.

Another one who obviously is invoked a lot is New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who has put that very much at the center of her ethos in politics. She has been very open about how she considers empathy key to transforming society and politics. She did so very early in her career, and I think an interesting example of what that looks like is her Wellbeing Budget in New Zealand.

She made a real effort after the Christchurch terrorist attacks in 2019 to bridge the divides within the society and make sure that the Muslim population that had been targeted by the attacker did not feel marginalized or left behind. She created a sense of community and a more vibrant New Zealand where everybody was a part of the country in their response.

She also matched that with very rapid action on gun control and on countering online violent extremism, so showing that more pragmatic side. It cannot just be nice words and kind messages; it actually has to be met by something tangible that people can see.

KEVIN MALONEY: This goes to one of the key issues to be solved when it comes to morality and amoral actors. We think about applied ethics here at the Council, and if you are going to engage in ethics, if you are going to engage with somebody else’s value system that you may disagree with, when you come through the doors here there is an understanding that you are going to engage in good faith, even if your value system is different and even if your beliefs are different.

But not everybody engages in good faith, and I think especially now where you see these challenges at a systemic level to pluralism, whether it is from tech actors, this transition from liberal to illiberal democracies, or the autocratic actors of the world—I am just throwing out some examples—what is the approach to empathy for somebody who has these political responsibilities and may be engaging on a daily basis with people who are not going to engage in good faith and don’t share the basic universal moral worth perspective of individuals? How do you think about navigating that?

CLAIRE YORKE: It is a great question. I think it is very important to be clear-eyed in the political space about the fact that we cannot afford to just be blind idealists about the potential of concepts like empathy, kindness, or compassion, and you are right; there will be people who will look to exploit that as a weakness or who just have no interest in it as a way of achieving their interests.

I think there is a need to differentiate between empathy in its ideal form, where you are trying to create a system that is inclusive, equitable, and kind and empathy that can also be more strategic about understanding what they are trying to get at, where they are coming from, and being very conscious of how people might misuse and abuse power, position, or authority in a way that will undermine your more common goals, so using it as a way to still understand it but recognizing that empathy has a hard edge.

I think it is important to note that empathy can have boundaries. Often it is seen as a weakness, as something that will just lead to appeasement and rolling over and letting people do whatever, and actually empathy to be effective should have boundaries. You should be able to articulate that you are willing to understand where people are coming from but that there are certain standards and certain limits to what you will tolerate and what is acceptable, and that is again about the norms of good behavior within governments, about the standards in this instance of politics: What do we expect as a basic standard for effective, healthy democracy, and how do we make sure that we can then hold those to account who are not living up to that?

The problem is that often those mechanisms at the moment that would call people to account are being eroded or are not being used properly, so people are getting away with far more than maybe they would have 20 years ago.

Empathy can have boundaries, and we also have to be very conscious that it can be performative, that some people can use it as a way of signaling virtue where maybe they do not have it, and that makes it difficult then because how do you know who has it and who doesn’t, especially if that is something that might be subjective? I will view the people I agree with in politics as having it but those I disagree with as lacking it, and it is never that simple or black and white, but there will be certain people who use the language of performative virtue, performative empathy, to ingratiate themselves with people in power when actually that is not their intention. That is where you start looking at other qualities: Are their words and actions aligning? Are they doing what they say they will do? When they talk about inclusivity are they really practicing it?

KEVIN MALONEY: From the Mandela example, considering what he was faced with, many people would have used a hard-power solution to address it, and he went in the other direction. I think this goes back to how we think about power as a concept and empathy as a prescription to open up potentially unseen pathways. The goal is to get people reconciled and back into a system, at the end of the day a new system but back into a type of system. It can’t be a free-for-all.

It is very interesting to think about empathy as a tool to deal with very difficult political situations, even violent political situations, but not as a tool that maybe people would think to reach for immediately.

CLAIRE YORKE: Also, we underestimate the power of empathy to be something quite strong, and that is what I am interested in. We often dismiss it because it is associated with emotions, kindness, or compassion, and that can make people feel like it doesn’t have a place in our politics, but actually to practice empathy, to do it well and to be effective at it, takes a huge amount of courage and strength because you have to be able to hold space for challenge, contestation, and difference, and that isn’t easy. It takes a very strong leader to be able to put aside their own ego, their own interests, and their own need to be right, and say, “There is something greater beyond all of us if we can work together.” That is far harder than just plowing ahead with your very narrow interests.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is also interesting from a leadership perspective. Again, we think about this a lot at the Council. What is the job description of a leader? The job description for a leader is to understand that this isn’t just an exercise to ingratiate yourself or to make money. The job description is to take the hits and be willing to do that.

It is an interesting moment right now. I think we are seeing civil society, private sector, and higher education tested, especially from a U.S. perspective, and while there are not many you are starting to see leaders who understand the job description start to separate themselves out. There are some great people I have been seeing lately. It is an interesting moment to be practicing empathy but in a non-performative, moral mask, virtue-signaling way, and that goes back to the framework in applied ethics, what we think about as the “ends and means equation,” being able to understand that not just from a transactional power perspective but from an individual ethical moral compass perspective as well.

CLAIRE YORKE: Exactly. That is the hard work.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is really difficult work.

One of the things I loved about the book was that in the closing chapters you lay out an approach for empathy in practice. Again, at the Council we think about this as your values informing your principles. Principles are actions, and principles can be informed by things such as values and your morals or they can be absent of those. Maybe you can walk our listeners through your playbook around how to actionalize empathy. This is what people want to hear. They want to hear the step-by-step process: What should we be thinking about? What should we be prioritizing in our own lives?

CLAIRE YORKE: In the final chapter where I do that I look at it in different levels because again, going back to this idea which is central to the book, empathy should exist in an ecosystem. It is not enough to expect our leaders to be the ones to make change. There is an action chapter where I have set out the steps. It is divided into the national level, the community level, and the individual level.

At the national level it is very much about how we start to create the political systems and structures where we can allow empathy to thrive, so it is about bridging that gap between politicians and the people, encouraging there to be more participatory democracy, for people to be able to engage with their politicians on a more regular basis, and for politicians to start listening far more to what citizens are saying, either through systems, assemblies, or through other forms of participatory democracy.

I think it is also important to see more bipartisanship, that actually on certain common issues, whether that is health care, environment, or education, we see people on different sides of the aisle or the chamber, depending on the political system that your country has, reaching across and finding common approaches to the challenges because at the moment we seem to be very much locked in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, where I’m from, in much more adversarial politics, where neither side really wants to give way to the other. We need more of that bipartisanship.

At more of a community level it is also about creating more civic spaces for people. How do we create environments where people can start to encounter difference on a more regular basis? There are some very good organizations, especially in the United States who doing this, groups like BridgeUSA, Braver Angels, and More in Common, that are starting to create environments where you can get people who vote differently and who think very differently about issues just connecting with each other, having conversations, and seeing the other side as human.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to underline a point of nuance which is very important. I have always thought about empathy as that, as far as the willingness to engage with difference and try to experience how somebody else lives, how their values are set, etc.

There is this dark narrative that is being pushed right now that in order to experience someone else they have to come in and change what you love or what your country was in its heyday. There is this nuance there. It is always this cycle where “I can’t be empathetic because that will require me to sacrifice something that I care about and love,” and people go back into their corners.

We are seeing this in the U.S. experience, for example, the other day with President Trump’s comments about Somali citizens in the United States. It is this fear factor in relation to even giving empathy a chance. I wanted to underline that because it is something I have been thinking about a lot lately.

CLAIRE YORKE: Do you think that more exposure to different perspectives in these kinds of spaces will help or are you finding that people are reluctant to engage?

KEVIN MALONEY: That is central to my value system. I have had some moments in my life where I was in situations that you could never understand unless you experienced it.

My wife is from India. The first time I went and visited her family, went for a few weeks 15 years ago to a city in South India, and there was nobody like me around. I was like, “Oh, this is what my wife felt like at college,” where I could always say, “Oh, I understand, I love you, yadda, blah blah blah,” but I barely understood even after that experience, but there is this light that goes off in your head where it is like, “Oh.”

I took a job when I worked in the private sector for a lot more money and was miserable. Anybody can tell you, “Oh, well, it’s not actually worth the money.” You have to trip and fall and make that mistake yourself because anytime somebody says that you are just going to roll your eyes.

There can be economic experience, personal experience, and family experience, but I would say from my own values perspective that was a very formative experience and the empathy that came with that experience, and I think that goes to at a higher level my own value system of prioritizing pluralism and universality, and starting from there then we can figure out the political stuff. But a lot of times nobody, not that I am special, wants to climb the rung up to universality and start. Empathy through experience has been a very powerful thing in my life.

CLAIRE YORKE: That is a great example. It also speaks to one of the steps that we have to do. We have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It is very easy in today’s environment, where we can stay in our echo chambers and bubbles on social media, to feel like we are always right and that we have the upper hand and the moral cause and actually I have seen those being comfortable being uncomfortable. You have got to be able to make that space and that time, and you must have had to confront some of your own assumptions or some of your own sense of privilege or experience in order to then come to the kinds of conclusions you did, so that requires us to self-reflect.

As citizens we have to get better at being uncomfortable and recognizing that experiences beyond our own awareness doesn’t make them less valid. There are people who have gone through things that we can’t imagine. That doesn’t make them wrong, but it should encourage us to be curious, and that is the step we should take. Rather than judging immediately, how do we get curious? How do we lean in? Ask more questions. Find out what the hinterland is to people’s own perspectives and interests.

KEVIN MALONEY: I also think, from a narrative and informational ecosystem environment perspective, people attach risk to being not perfectly right about something, but at the end of the day it is an experience that is attached to every individual person. There are some empirical things that are very important that we agree on and get right because these can poison the water or give you bad medicine. There are all these things. We have to agree on the traffic light colors.

But there are other things that don’t really matter that are more opinion-based, and it is okay if you don’t agree with somebody on that. It doesn’t need to ruin your day. It is not going to end your world.

But now everything is personally politicized, zero-sum, and I don’t see the trend changing on that right now, but it almost sucks the air out of the room for the ability to experience empathy. All these ecosystems are being made almost anti-empathetic. It is not meant to thrive. It is very difficult to find civic spaces, like you said, to experience it in a good-faith way.

CLAIRE YORKE: Also to get better at acknowledging when we have got it wrong. There is a humility that comes with that, and we don’t see it very often in our politicians, but we should. I think that is an important value as well, that we see politicians able to say, “I got this wrong, I made a mistake,” and that we are able to do it in our everyday lives, that we step back a bit.

At the time we are talking, I know you just had Thanksgiving over there, Christmas and the holiday season is coming up, where a lot of people will be worried about the dinner table discussions, but it’s okay if you just don’t agree and change the topic.

I know there is more nuance to that. I know there are some issues that deny someone the right to their own dignity, and that is an issue. That is something that requires more work, but actually for a lot of the more moderate things we have to get better at engaging.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think two things can be true at once. As you said, there are high-consequence nuanced things where you cannot just let it go. I have found in stressful family situations around these dinner tables that this is the moment in almost more of a low-stakes way to train your temperance, to train your virtues that you want to get better at, to count to ten.

Family is a trial by fire in that way, and you can take that into the workplace. This can be your gym. You can work that out from an ethical perspective. You can work the moral muscle there, especially around some of these virtues that we try to cultivate that are related to empathy. I fully agree with you on that. It has been top of mind. We just got through Thanksgiving, and now we have to get through Christmas.

CLAIRE YORKE: Yes, use it as a time to practice empathy and see how you feel by the new year, whether it feels a little bit easier.

KEVIN MALONEY: I love that. I hope my family is listening to this so they know my approach in the coming weeks.

I want to go back to a more serious note. There were multiple times during our conversation where I wanted to interject, but I waited on this. Around this tension I see in terms of the moment we are in politically and the prescription we have talked a lot about with empathy, in that it needs to be not only top-down from a leader perspective but it needs to be grassroots and bottom-up if we are going to break some of the shackles of politicization and a zero-sum polarized world.

I guess the big question is that for a lot of democracies around the world it feels like a moment where it is on a razor’s edge, and there is this tension in that you need strong moral leaders at least as part of the solution, and we have seen the consequences of immoral strong leaders. How do you square the circle, thinking about empathy within strong leaders without succumbing to the strong-leader model, even if it starts from a moral perspective?

CLAIRE YORKE: That to me gets to the idea of the ecosystem, that what we need is a multi-pronged approach where we start calling for more of the moral leadership, that we start making those choices at the ballot box, that we start holding more people to account in the media and in society, and that we stop shifting what it is we value as leadership qualities at the top, but at the same we start to ask very real questions: “What is the nature of our political system itself? Is it letting those people get to the top?”

How do we think about that? There is some good work being done by organizations like Compassion in Politics and Better Politics Foundation about how we make it so that politics is not a toxic work environment, so that you don’t get politicians who are burned out and whose capacity to care is being pushed to the breaking point. How do we change that political culture and encourage more collegiality and more bipartisanship and more consideration of care?

At the same time, how do we start modeling it at the bottom, so that some politicians say, “Oh, this way of doing business that is the strong amoral leadership is just not going to fly anymore because that is not what people want.” And when do you start to see the impact of that?

The challenge is that it is being dependent on so many spaces being invested in that change. I don’t think it is enough to wait for strong moral leaders to come through. We have to help create the conditions where they will be rewarded and where it is possible, but we have to show that it will survive without them as well.

I think there is actually a lot of hope and comfort to be derived when you start to look at what is going on in the citizen and the civic space. You have some amazing initiatives in places like Oregon and California where participatory democracy is making some positive strides to create change. I think you have a lot of organizations that are showing different ways of doing things, but we have to start telling that story more publicly, letting people know about it.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think one of the big opportunities right now—I am in my late 30s and I have had this moment recently after my wife and I started a family where your friend circle starts to close and then you start to crave that connection again. You are busy with work and kids and you used to have all these friends in your 20s and it just kind of closes.

The point I am making is that especially in this head-down-on-my-phone-scrolling-even-next-to-my-spouse environment—I think this goes across any age group—people are craving civic space and craving individuals. You still get that from sports and concerts to an extent, but the spaces are disappearing, so I think there is an interesting and amazing opportunity within the structure of pluralism to find new and innovative ways to create these experiences for people. That is as good of a dopamine hit as you are ever going to get on Instagram. You have to figure out how to incentivize and showcase how that can be possible for people.

CLAIRE YORKE: Again, you have to get uncomfortable and put in the effort. You have to put on shoes and go meet people you don’t know, go through the small talk like, “Who are you, where are you from, what do you do?” Just a few years ago your former surgeon general released a report about the epidemic of loneliness, especially in the United States, and how that can have corrosive implications for health and well-being, how that is responsible for increased anxiety, depression, mental discomfort, and ill health.

I think there is something in that. We are wired for connection, and we have forgotten that. I think that there are a lot of seeds and evidence that there is an appetite for that and that it is thriving in certain spaces, but we need to make it far more the norm. We need to make it more mainstream. I think that will help make it easier for people to connect with others and start to build that empathy back into how we relate to others.

KEVIN MALONEY: I cannot recommend this book enough to everybody who is listening, I think specifically because there is, as we talked about, so much in it from a personal perspective. There are multiple levels, the personal and political perspectives, so those working in politics and higher education I think you are going to get something out of this personally and your day job will be better. For people who are looking at it just from an individual perspective I think you will get a lot out of it because everybody is involved at least from a phone-in-their-hands perspective in politics right now.

I want to close, Claire, in terms of anything we might not have hit on from an empathy perspective. I am going to give the floor to you. A lot of times, not to be overly proscriptive, I like to give listeners something they can take home and take action on.

CLAIRE YORKE: Amazing. There are a couple of things I would emphasize that reflect back on themes from our conversation. One is that I think this idea of pragmatic idealism is a helpful way through right now, that we hold as citizens, as a collective, an ideal of what we want our politics to be, but we also embrace the messy, hard work it will take us to get there, that it is not that simple, that you will need to show up, and we need to start having the difficult conversations with people who disagree with us about what change can look like and what it will take.

There is also an important message about hope and the power of hope in politics. There is still this hope, and that gives us energy and motivation, but it has to be matched by courage. If we hope for something better, if we imagine that this is not who we are or what we are capable of and that there is far more beyond that, we have to have the courage to work for that and maintain that sense of hope.

Connected with that we also need to start telling better stories about who we are, what we are about, what it is that makes us human, what it is that makes us thrive as communities, and about how we start to translate that into very real, practical, inclusive politics that everyone can be a part of. We can’t leave people behind. We can’t solve this current moment by excluding more people from the next iteration of politics, so we need those strong visionary leaders, but we also need people who can take everyone with them, and that is not just the work of any one person. That is the work of all of us.

KEVIN MALONEY: This is a theme that has been cutting through all of my conversations, that it is a time for courage and a time to embrace a values-based approach to civic life. Okay, but I don’t want to do that by myself.

Find your values-linked community because it is hard being alone on the values island, but if we can find a community together, then this helps drive our personal courage and energy and obviously has a domino effect from a community perspective. As everybody at Carnegie Council knows, this is a theme that has been popping up, so thank you for underlining it.

CLAIRE YORKE: Thank you so much.

KEVIN MALONEY: Claire, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it.

CLAIRE YORKE: It has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.