LAST WEEK, AFTER SEVERAL congressional Democrats announced plans to try to help Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the immigrant the Trump administration shipped off to a notorious prison in his native El Salvador despite a 2019 court order expressly prohibiting his deportation to that country, right-wing culture warrior Christopher Rufo had this response:
The analogy is bizarre in many ways: For starters, Luigi Mangione is awaiting trial for the premeditated murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson while Abrego Garcia has never been charged with any crime. Also, showing empathy for a probably innocent man who may be facing life imprisonment in a modern-day gulag at the age of 29 is . . . maybe not so pathological? And lastly, concern for Abrego Garcia’s fate is not just about “empathy”: It is, first and foremost, about the outrageous facts of a case in which a man who had legal authorization to live in the United States (and is the husband and father of U.S. citizens) has been disappeared without due process—and our government is refusing to return him in defiance of the courts.
But, notably, Rufo’s tweet is not a one-off: It’s part of a larger trend of empathy-bashing on the right, particularly but not only in the context of immigration. After the Supreme Court ruling on Abrego Garcia in which Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett partly joined the three liberal justices in a dissent arguing that the deportations should have been paused pending judicial review, the MAGA right blasted her as a fraud and a traitor—and many zeroed in on her alleged empathy problem. After Utah Sen. Mike Lee expressed disappointment in Barrett, tech tycoon and top Trump adviser Elon Musk offered one of his laconic commentaries:
And some, such as right-wing psychologist J.D. Haltigan, explicitly linked the pesky empathy problem to sex and “mass feminization”:
The same charge cropped up last month after Barrett voted with John Roberts and the liberal justices to uphold a lower court order requiring the administration to pay out $2 billion to contractors for work already completed for the United States Agency for International Development. And, once again, the sexism—some of it from women—easily came to the surface. “As a woman I can say this. Do not put another spineless woman whose suicidal empathy will allow her to turn from sanity to the ugly opinions of other females,” railed an X poster with “Christ is King” in her bio. (That’s presumably the same Christ who said “Blessed are the merciful”; but, as David French recently noted in the New York Times, “empathy” has lately become a dirty word on the evangelical Christian right.)
The recurrence of the phrase “suicidal empathy” is no accident: The term is becoming a right-wing buzzword. Apparently coined by Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad, an Intellectual Dark Web-adjacent figure, this concept was boosted by Musk in his February 28 appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where Musk declared empathy to be “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization” and said that “we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.” Friedrich Nietzsche, call your office.
Saad, meanwhile, has been using the Abrego Garcia story to plug his forthcoming book Suicidal Empathy, which he says examines “the descent to madness” produced when “our emotional system is tricked into an orgiastic hyperactive form of empathy, deployed on the wrong targets.” It will be joining such recent releases as the bestselling Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion by right-wing activist Allie Beth Stuckey and The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits by theologian Joe Rigney.
As the sexist attacks on Barrett indicate, the right’s war on empathy often has a distinctly misogynistic subtext. Empathy generally tends to be regarded as a feminine trait, and women do, on average, report higher levels of empathy than men (though studies of objective evidence yield mixed results). It’s not that the anti-empathy right goes easy on males—Pope Francis is a favorite target—but the swipes at women are far more likely to be sex-specific. Saad’s recent activity on X includes such elegant insights as, “White liberal women = apex suicidal empathy” and “Suicidal Empathy can afflict all people but some women take it to an art form.”1 Men diagnosed as suffering from this affliction are often depicted as effeminate or low-testosterone. I suppose that explains the three male justices, two of them Trump appointees, who joined in last Saturday’s order blocking the deportations of any Venezuelans held in a Texas detention center pending removal under the Alien Enemies Act.
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IT’S ENTIRELY POSSIBLE, of course, to critique an excessive focus of empathy without being an atrocity apologist or a misogynist.2 Empathy certainly lends itself to manipulation—or, in fashionable lingo, “weaponization”—for ulterior political or ideological motives. But such manipulation is hardly limited to any one faction. Even as MAGA “influencers” scoff at progressive empathy for migrants, they also make the blatantly empathy-based (and logic-free) argument that deportees are not entitled to due process because Americans murdered by illegal immigrants, such as Laken Riley, were killed without due process. For that matter, empathy for ordinary Americans who feel victimized by globalization, immigration, “woke” excesses, cancel culture, urban chaos, COVID lockdowns, and other real or perceived menaces from the right’s gallery of horrors looms is a central element in the rhetoric of the populist right.
It is also true that a primarily empathy-centered politics or discourse is inadequate for a variety of other reasons. Appeals to emotion can be used to shut down debate and substitute for reasonable argument (again: just look at MAGA). Sympathy for human suffering doesn’t tell us how to remedy it, and some remedies may well be counterproductive. In many cultural and political conflicts, there are legitimate claims to sympathy on both sides. In practice, sympathy is often allocated on a partisan basis.
At the same time, it would be absurd to argue that concern with harm to human beings shouldn’t enter into consideration at all when making political or even legal decisions. (Adam Smith regarded “sympathy” and “fellow-feeling” as essential to moral judgment and social relations.) And, as the attacks on Barrett show, the critique of empathy is also easily weaponized: Any argument someone dislikes can be discounted as out-of-control empathy, at least if it incorporates some element of respect for human rights or human decency.
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It’s revealing that Saad’s definition of “suicidal empathy” specifies that it’s “deployed on the wrong targets,” such as immigrants or transgender athletes. Or, for that matter, Volodymyr Zelensky: after Trump and JD Vance berated Zelensky for his lack of deference during their February 28 Oval Office meeting, Saad mocked Americans angered by the treatment of Zelensky as believers in “kindness and empathy” upset because “Trump and Vance were really really mean and that’s not nice.” Whatever the dangers of empathy-based politics or discourse, it’s clear that anti-empathy discourse can itself become an excuse for cruelty.
Or for downright atrocities. Indeed, tirades against supposedly misguided compassion appear again and again in the annals of totalitarian ideologies. At the height of the Reign of Terror in France, Robespierre gave a speech in which he derided those who showed excessive pity for enemies of the republic (or their families) and asserted that clemency toward “the oppressors of humanity” was actually barbaric. During the Russian Revolution, Lenin inveighed against “abstract humanism” and sneered at liberal intellectuals who were “moaning and sobbing” over the victims of a “just civil war against landowners and capitalists.”
In fact, it’s probably a good rule of thumb that if a political movement spends a lot of energy trashing human kindness, it’s bad.
In the toxic stew of modern-day American politics, the right certainly doesn’t hold a monopoly on cruelty: Some of the “cancel campaigns” of the 2010s were extremely nasty, and the left has its own forms of empathy-bashing, such as mocking the distress of accused wrongdoers as “white tears” or “male tears.” However, MAGA has raised performative contempt for “fellow-feeling” to an odious art form, especially since not even the worst cancellations were remotely comparable to being deported to a foreign gulag or denied access to lifesaving medicine because some twentysomething DOGE staffer decided to chop up the foreign aid program that supplied it.
But not to worry: Trump world isn’t always anti-empathy. The day after the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk was extremely incensed by the cover of the New York Times Sunday opinion section (printed before the shooting) which said, “He FAILED the test of leadership and BETRAYED America. Voters must REJECT him in November.”
“They are truly callous and despicable human beings,” wrote Musk. “Not a shred of empathy.”
Lack of empathy for a presidential candidate whose leadership and legacy was harshly (and correctly) assessed by a newspaper: callous and despicable. Empathy for a migrant ripped away from his family and abruptly flown to a brutal foreign prison: suicidal.
It’s MAGA logic.
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1
The latter was a comment on a post asserting that former German chancellor Angela Merkel, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde—all women!—are “the three people who have destroyed Europe.” I get that Merkel gets tagged with the “empathy” label because of her decision to admit Syrian refugees, but what did Lagarde or von der Leyen ever do that was so empathetic?
2
Literary critic Irving Babbit argued over a hundred years ago, in Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), that the over-valorization of sentiment and sympathy by many of the Romantics eroded intellectual discourse and moral standards.
