How Did We Stop Following the Golden Rule?
Cruelty didn’t come out of nowhere. We cleared the way for it.
The Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—used to be more than a moral nicety. It was a baseline for civilization, an unspoken agreement that we wouldn’t weaponize power just because we could. We taught it to children because we knew adults would forget. And somewhere between free trade and artificial intelligence, between empathy-fatigue and political contempt, we did forget.
The cruelty that defines so much of American politics today didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from the vacuum we created when we stopped caring what it felt like to be on the receiving end of our decisions. And the most tragic part? The people who claimed the moral high ground—liberals, progressives, champions of fairness—were the first to walk away from the rule they preached.
The People Who Preached Compassion Abandoned It First
For decades, working Americans were told that their jobs, their towns, their futures were sacrifices on the altar of progress. Factories closed, coal was shamed, unions were hollowed out. And those who dared to protest were met with lectures about efficiency and the global economy.
Liberals didn’t just tolerate this—they led it. They signed the trade deals. They gutted the safety nets. They told generations of working-class Americans to “retrain” or “relocate,” as if the dignity of labor could be replaced by a TED Talk.
Then, when those workers got angry, they were labeled ignorant or regressive. Their suffering wasn’t just ignored—it was moralized against. And then came the lectures. The condescending sermons about tolerance and compassion from the very people who had shown neither.
Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment may have been the final tipping point—the moment when millions of Americans realized the party that preached empathy had none for them. Here were people whose jobs had been shipped overseas, whose communities had been hollowed out, whose pain had been dismissed—and now they were being called deplorable for their anger.
No one asked: “Would I want this done to me?” The Golden Rule had quietly been shelved, replaced by spreadsheets, slogans, and sanctimony.
MAGA Didn’t Start the Cruelty—It Finished the Job
When liberals abandoned empathy, they didn’t just fail to protect the vulnerable. They left the door open for something far worse. The cruelty now paraded by MAGA politicians—the callousness, the scapegoating, the performative dominance—wasn’t born in a vacuum. It was invited.
Trump didn’t create the anger. He recognized it, embraced it, and weaponized it. He offered not compassion, but revenge. He saw the vacuum left behind when the party of the people became the party of credentialed detachment—and he filled it with fire.
So yes, MAGA is cruel. But it’s not a betrayal of some moral era—it’s a reaction to a moral void.
No Accountability, No Redemption
What makes this so much worse is the complete lack of responsibility.
There’s been no apology. No reckoning. No honest self-assessment.
The same liberal class that outsourced your job now talks about “misinformation.” The same politicians who said, “Learn to code,” now talk about rebuilding the middle class—as if they didn’t just spend decades dismantling it. The think tanks, the editorial boards, the donors—they’ve all moved on. They changed the subject.
And now that the rage has metastasized into authoritarianism and political violence, they pretend to be shocked. But the cruelty wasn’t sudden. It was the long tail of abandonment.
What Happens When AI Comes for the “Safe” Class?
And now, it’s happening again—just dressed in newer clothes.
AI is coming. Not just for truck drivers, but for coders, lawyers, teachers, analysts. The very people who once told others to “adapt” are about to be displaced themselves.
And here’s the real question: Will anyone show them the empathy they denied others?
If we haven’t learned by now, the answer is no. We’ll make the same excuses:
“This is innovation.”
“You’ll just have to reskill.”
“It’s inevitable.”
We will break another generation—and we will call it progress again.
Unless we finally admit: we got this wrong before.
The Golden Rule Wasn’t Lost. It Was Abandoned.
The Golden Rule was never about sentimentality. It was about moral restraint in the presence of power. It told you: when you can hurt someone and justify it, don’t. When you can benefit at someone else’s expense, think again.
We broke it for convenience. For status. For power. And now, cruelty feels normal because we normalized it.
We can blame Trump. We can blame social media. But until we look in the mirror and say: “We stopped following the one rule that made us human,” we’re not coming back from this.
We Still Have a Choice
The truth is ugly. We didn’t follow the Golden Rule. We violated it—systematically, unapologetically, and for decades. And now we’re living in the aftermath.
But here’s the one thing cruelty can’t stop:
You can still ask the question. You can still choose empathy. You can still say, “Would I want this done to me?”—and let the answer shape what comes next.
It won’t undo the past. But it’s the only way to prevent a darker future. And it’s the only rule worth rebuilding a broken country around.