Make America. . .compassionate again?

What does compassion have to do with civic engagement? This is not an idle question, but—seeing as I am a political candidate for the first time in my life—it is one that came home to me with particular force recently.

The scene was a cocktail party, the kind of affair where one spends most of one’s time shooting the breeze with total strangers about relatively inconsequential things like sports and the weather—and of course, at this time of this midterm election year, politics.

My conversation partner was a middle-aged woman, like myself. She proudly identified as a rock-ribbed conservative R...