I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching to understand what happened to empathy as a common value in our country, a norm by which we respect and treat one another with basic human decency.

Google “conservative attack on empathy,” and you’ll see references to Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Christian fundamentalists among others. What you’ll read are varying indictments of empathy as a weakness and as an existential threat to our nation.

“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk told Rogan in February. While Musk has since had a falling out with Donald Trump, such views are still central to right wing doctrine in our country, and one the liberal left needs to better understand.

Empathy is one of the glues that keeps our society together. But that’s not how the conservative right sees it. Has there been some linguistic voodoo magic going on here that makes many Americans view empathy as a weakness and their perceived enemies as “evil?”

For answers to that question, I spoke with a linguistics expert, Janet McIntosh, a professor of anthropology at Brandeis University. Her work has explored religion, right-wing ideologies and militarization. “Kill Talk” is the title of her latest book. It examines how military language enables military members to both kill and to imagine themselves as killable.

To prepare soldiers to go to war, our armed forces use language to teach young men and women to dehumanize the enemy because that’s the way to condition them to kill people, she says. But what happens when that same “linguistic infrastructure” is used on a civilian population to similarly treat others as less than human?

Linguistic infrastructure is a term used often in “Kill Talk.” It’s a “loose collection of disparate verbal strategies that guide soldiers in how to perceive, feel, think, and ultimately act in combat,” says McIntosh.

Empathy is a major theme in the book. “Kill talk,” McIntosh writes, blocks empathy as a consideration for the enemy and for those killed or injured in war. It also toughens recruits, male and female, through toxic masculinity.

What’s sobering is that we are seeing language similarly deployed in America today against our own citizens. Such language is being used to coalesce the Trump base.  From “Alligator Alcatraz” to labeling people as “evil” or as a “threat to humanity,” words are used to rationalize cruelty.

“With MAGA right now, it’s like those same battlefield values have been brought to bear inside our nation,” says McIntosh, who also co-wrote and co-edited the 2020 book “Language in the Trump Era.”

Such battlefield rhetoric was always used during wartime to divorce combatants from human decency. But now, McIntosh says, we are seeing it used here at home.

“So now we have, as an example, this weird, militarized police force in the form of ICE with its growing budget that is terrorizing communities and bringing a battlefield dehumanization right inside our own country,” McIntosh tells me.

In doing her research, McIntosh spoke with military veterans who were in combat in Vietnam, or in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, including several from Massachusetts.

McIntosh will be in Northampton on Aug. 15 at 7 p.m. at the Available Potential Enterprises (A.P.E.) gallery at 126 Main St., to discuss her book and to offer insight into today’s political linguistic environment. Four of the veterans featured in her book, all poets, will also be there to discuss their writing.

“I’m looking forward to exploring these themes and the importance of understanding necropolitics,” she says.

Necropolitics is in the subtitle of her book: “Language and Military Necropolitics.”  In simple terms, necropolitics is how political power determines who lives and who dies and who is considered disposable, she says.

In warfare, necropolitical decisions are made to justify killing people, both enemy combatants and civilians. But what happens when such decisions are made against Americans by Americans? What happens when cruelty and dehumanization are used to condone hateful behavior that is anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-science, and anti-diversity?

We’re now in an entirely different political environment — the environment of necropolitics and “kill talk.” All Americans should be scared about this, McIntosh says.

“Suspending norms for how we treat people outside the MAGA movement is frighteningly like the tactics used by our armed forces when preparing people to go to war,” she says.

Our fight to save our democracy today must therefore be a fight to directly confront this attack on empathy. If we lose the human capacity to feel for others and to respect those who are different than us, then all is lost.

Many things distress me, but what causes me the greatest anxiety is the use of language to dehumanize people and to allow MAGA to be comfortable in its name calling — whether it be against immigrants, gay, transgender people, or any of us deemed weak or woke. Maybe before, you could shrug when you heard labels such as liberal, socialist, or Marxist being used as insults. But you can’t shrug off being called “evil.”

For politics to work, empathy must be a core principle.  It’s basic to our capacity for societal growth and for progress. None of us can sit on the sidelines anymore in safeguarding it.  If you haven’t yet joined  the civil resistance, now’s the time. Otherwise, we will lose what it means to be American, and, yes, human.

John Paradis is a member of the Veteran Action Team with Indivisible Northampton — Swing Left Western Massachusetts. He is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and lives in Florence.