When you stop empathizing with people, you’ve taken a step toward dehumanizing them. You aren’t under any obligation to empathize, and goodness knows it is tiring. However, it is important to realize that once you stop empathizing, you are more likely to accept extreme solutions in a subconscious attempt to resolve your frustration.

Depending on your definitions (empathy, sympathy, and compassion are often confusingly defined and contradictory between dictionaries), you ARE empathizing by realizing they are mental children. You’re just not sympathizing and therefore deciding no longer to act with compassion, which makes plenty of sense to me.

IMHO it’s good to empathize with the right (understand your attacker), but it’s also important have to understand that whatever the underlying reasons, these people, when activated into an idiot army they become a dangerous group.

The definitions that make the most sense to me is

Empathy - understanding the perspective of another, where there desires and fears come from. It takes intelligence to not just project one’s own personality on everyone else and understand that they are different.

Sympathy - Feeling in sync with another (like when you speak of sympathetic guitar strings causing each other to vibrate). Like you see the bombing in Gaza and not just understand that they don’t want to be bombed (empathy), but imagining the pain of losing your child.

Compassion - The positive treatment of another due to having sympathy for them

You have simultaneously also described why you can’t easily unite a left-leaning base. My issue is obviously the most important (and so is everyone else’s to them) at every moment. Also if you are a rep you are honor bound to resign and recuse and be a perfect parent of the children in the other camp.

Yes, we can walk and chew gum, but you can’t chase every car in the lot at the same time and you can’t shoot yourself in the leg out of honor when the competition is going to shoot your other leg for spite.

Honestly, I think there is a real problem with infantilisation - and (Warning: unpopular opinion) a large part of this is the marvel films and manga trend. Those always over simplify every problem to a short, violent solution.