By CHARLES M. BLOW Thanks too the New York Times.
Today's America — at least as measured by the actions and inactions of the pariahs who roam its halls of power and the people who put them there — is insular, cruel and uncaring.
In this America, the House can — as it did in July — pass a farm bill that left out the food stamp program at a time when a record number of Americans, nearly 48 million, are depending on the benefits.
In this America, a land of immigrants, comprehensive immigration reform can be stalled in The People's Branch of government, and anti-reform mouthpieces like Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan can warn that immigration reform will be the end of the country.
And in today's America, poverty and homelessness can easily seep beneath the wall we erect in our minds to define it.
A December report by the United States Conference of Mayors that surveyed 25 cities found that all but 4 of them reported an increase in requests for emergency food aid since 2011, and three-fourths of them expected those requests to increase in 2013.
The report also found that 60 percent of the cities surveyed had seen an increase in homelessness, and the same percentage of cities expected homelessness to increase in 2013.
How did we come to such a pass? Why aren't more politicians — and people in general — expressing outrage and showing empathy?
Part of our current condition is obviously partisan. Republicans have become the party of "blame the victim." Whatever your lesser lot in life, it's completely within your means to correct, according to their logic. Poverty, hunger, homelessness and desperation aren't violence to the spirit but motivation to the will. If you want more and you work harder, all your problems will disappear. Sink or swim. Pull yourself up. Get over it. Of course, that narrow conservative doctrine denies a broader reality: that there are working poor and chronically unemployed — people who do want and who do work and who do want to work, but who remain stuck on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.
In this regard, Republicans have all but abandoned the idea of compassionate conservatism and are diving headlong into callous conservatism.
But another problem may be more broad-based: the way that many Americans look at the poor with disgust.
Fiske's research shows that people respond not only to the poor and homeless with revulsion, but they also react negatively to people they perceive as undocumented immigrants — essentially anyone without an address.
If some people's impulse is to turn up a nose rather than extend a hand, no wonder we send so many lawmakers empty of empathy to Congress. No wonder more people don't demand that Congress stand up for the least among us rather than on them.