At this year’s Screen Actors Guild awards, 87-year-old actress Jane Fonda accepted a lifetime achievement award and made a politically charged speech. Unlike most of her fellow stars, however, Fonda did not take up one pet cause — instead, she got right to the heart of the deep cultural polarization that ails us.

After noting that actors must learn to empathize with those they are portraying on screen, Fonda declared: “Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke.”

Fonda is right: Empathy is not weak — or woke. At least, not per se. It is best understood as the impulse and ability to feel and identify with the feelings of others. Correlated with agreeability, empathy is a characteristic disproportionately evinced by women.

Thoughtfully directed toward virtuous causes, empathy is an asset; it’s what makes many women quick to volunteer for noble causes and to help neighbors. What Fonda is really implying, though — and what today’s most vocal leftists uniformly believe — is that empathy is a virtue unto itself when indiscriminately deployed on behalf of the systemically marginalized. Or, as Fonda put it: “Woke just means you give a damn about other people.”

This is the false belief that makes today’s elite left and its predominantly educated, female adherents so out of touch with everyday Americans — and, as I have written, so apt to hurt the very people they purport to help. For example, in the name of fighting institutionalized racism, they agitate to eliminate the tools of law and order that

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