Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way.

Saunders is arguing that political identity (“left, right”) often hardens into abstraction, but narrative and lived experience can cut through that rigidity. When an issue is framed as a concrete relationship—one person encountering another’s suffering—readers and listeners are more likely to respond with empathy than with ideology. The quote reflects a core principle of his fiction and essays: moral attention is trained by specificity, voice, and felt consequence rather than by slogans. It also implies a practical ethic for public discourse: if we want understanding across divides, we should start from human stakes and particular stories, because compassion is more widely shared than conceptual agreement.