When accused of being a socialist, Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, was quoted as saying, “One man’s socialism is another man’s neighborliness.”

On the surface, this folksy retort seems harmless and even a bit inspirational. What’s wrong with being neighborly? Shouldn’t we all strive to embody such ideals? It is the Christian thing to do, after all — love your neighbor as you love yourself.

However, this is actually a clever manipulation tactic known as weaponized empathy — and it is a favorite tool within the progressive socialist toolbox.

Weaponized Empathy

It is reminiscent of the “Think of the Children” fallacy, where one attempts to win an argument purely through emotional manipulation, using children to garner pity, rather than by using facts and logic. A good example of such a tactic is often seen in debates around illegal immigration, where children of illegal immigrants are used as props to stir emotions to avoid confronting the problems surrounding the large number of immigrants still sneaking over our borders. The implication is that if you disagree with illegal immigration, you do not care about the suffering of immigrant children.

Weaponized empathy may be the most common (and often, the only) defense of progressive policies, and it serves as rationalization for all manner of government intervention.

During COVID, if you refused the experimental vaccine, you were told that you didn’t care about others and wanted people’s grandmothers to die.

If you didn’t support Black Lives Matter during the riots of 2020, you were called a racist and told that you didn’t care about black people.

If you are pro-life, you are told that you don’t care about women — or worse, actively want to control their bodies and make them suffer.

Many people even take up progressive positions, not because they deeply believe in them, but simply because they want to avoid the social ostracization that comes with rejecting them. The tactic is effective. The message is that if you don’t believe in or actively support progressive policies, you don’t care about others. If you don’t support the means, you don’t care about the ends.

Now, Tim Walz wants us to believe that if we don’t support socialist policies, we are not being neighborly. If we don’t support expansive government programs and interventions, we just want our neighbors to suffer. Socialism is the only solution. Think of the children!

“Neighborly” Nations Throughout History

Walz’s “it feels good” mentality is an excellent example of the inherent dangers of ideologies like socialism and communism and how easily they can take hold in a country. It is one thing to want to be “neighborly” personally and help others in a way that is meaningful to you. It is an entirely different thing to shuttle that desire into the government and transform it into forced benevolence.

Mostly everyone would agree that the concept of “being neighborly” is a noble endeavor. But what is “being neighborly” when it comes to the government? Who gets to define what it means to be “neighborly?” What are the consequences for not being “neighborly” enough?

Again, we need only look back to the COVID response to see how these questions are often answered. People were fired from their jobs, threatened, barred from travel, and had their businesses shut down — all in the name of being “neighborly.”

Historically, being neighborly is not something governments are very good at defining at all. During the Chinese cultural revolution, it was considered neighborly to attack suspected enemies of communism in the streets. In World War II Germany, it was neighborly to report your Jewish neighbors to the government. In pre-Civil War America, it was neighborly to report or help track down escaped slaves. Clearly, the simple concept of “being neighborly” is not remotely enough to justify or rationalize any government policy.

State-Mandated Christianity?

We Christians often hear about the separation of church and state and are told to keep our religion out of the government. This is usually a bad-faith argument that misrepresents Christian positions, but it does at least serve as evidence that progressives like Walz seem to have an acute understanding of the inherent dangers of a government operating under ideological capture and attempting to legislate dogmatic morality.

Many Christians tithe at least 10% of their income to their church and give offerings and donations well beyond that to various Christian organizations. This is considered a biblical and moral practice. Yet, Christians do not force others to do this, and people would rightly consider it tyrannical if we tried. What if Christians attempted to use the government to force people to pray, to kneel at the altar, to go on mission trips to Haiti or Africa, or to fast for a month — and the government punished anyone who refused? If you don’t support government-mandated donations to World Vision, you clearly don’t care about people who are suffering!

Generally, Christians believe it is good to pray, to worship, to fast, and to go on missions. However, in the hands of the government, such things cannot help but to become oppressive nightmares. Beyond the immorality of forcing people to do things they don’t believe in, the government would inevitably redefine prayer, worship, fasting, and missions to serve its own agenda. We have seen this done already with horrific consequences throughout history. Awful things have unfortunately been done in the name of God. Horrific things continue to be done in the name of “Allah” throughout the Middle East. It isn’t difficult to see how horrendous such a religious government would be in the United States, let alone in the hands of someone vehemently disagrees with Christianity. Our founding fathers understood this very well and determined that religious freedom should be prioritized and enshrined in the Constitution, with a pronouncement that governments should never be permitted to legislate such belief systems.

A Deliberate Choice

This includes the religion of progressivism. It is not by accident that Walz was a governor who allowed BLM rioters to destroy businesses in Minnesota and that his wife stated that she kept the windows open so she could “smell the burning tires.” It is not a mystery why Kamala Harris wanted to bail out those rioters, or why she champions destructive concepts like equity (i.e. governmental attempts to force equal outcomes).

It is not difficult to understand this kind of behavior. They are being guided by what can only be described as religious fervor. Progressivism, along with its socialist ideals, is a religious belief system with its own dogmas and sense of morality and faith. It is the very kind of belief system that our founding fathers adamantly insisted governments be barred from establishing. The insistence that people are somehow morally deficient if they don’t embrace a government’s radical ideology and worship its idols is also a hallmark of political oppression and is often used as a rationale for barbarity.

So, no, one man’s socialism is not another man’s neighborliness, Mr. Walz. Socialism is socialism. And once it involves the government, there is nothing neighborly about it. Kindness results from voluntary action, not forced acceptance of a government-mandated ideology.

There is nothing wrong with being neighborly. There is a lot wrong with trying to use the government to force people to be your definition of “neighborly.”

Leonydus is a writer, cultural/political commentator, and host of “Informed Dissent,” bringing common sense, liberty-minded perspectives to a variety of hot-button topics including race, politics, economics, psychology, and religion that dare to challenge the accepted narratives. He is also the author of Raising Victims: The Pernicious Rise of Critical Race Theory (Salem Books, 2023).