In this episode of “The Opinions,” the Times Opinion politics correspondent Michelle Cottle speaks to the columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French about the rise of “toxic empathy” and how the right has turned compassion into weakness.
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The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: Today I want us to talk about something of a vibe shift that’s happening right now in politics. I feel like we’re seeing a prime example in what might darkly be characterized as the “death of empathy.”
So hear me out on this. When people are feeling sour or anxious, I think they don’t want to be lectured that other people have it worse than they do. Instead, they want to be told they are justified in being upset and aggrieved and that their leaders, as Bill Clinton liked to tell us, “feel their pain.” And it’s even better if they are given a convenient group to blame for their troubles.
For years now, progressives have been engaged in a competition of sorts, which is like, “In the hierarchy of intersectionality, who has the most right to be upset?” And that has put conservative white men in particular on the defensive at a time when they’re already freaked out about shifting social and economic hierarchies. So a lot of people are tired of feeling guilty, and they have been very open to the idea that empathy or compassion is a weakness.
Am I completely off base here? Are you guys seeing this? And if so, when and where did you notice it happening?
Jamelle Bouie: I think I disagree somewhat with the premise that American progressives have been engaged in this game establishing a hierarchy of oppression. I think that is an unfriendly gloss on progressives’ concern with marginalized people. Just speaking as someone who’s around progressives, and has been for a long time, that’s not really something I’ve ever perceived. But setting that aside, I do think that there is a disdain for empathy, but I don’t necessarily see that as a novel phenomenon of American politics in this moment.
I recently read a really interesting book, “America Last,” by Jacob Heilbrunn. It’s a sort of history of the American right in a lot of ways, not the conservative movement, but the larger right over time, and you see antecedents to this kind of contempt for empathy going back to like the 1920s and 1930s. So I don’t think it’s new.
I do think that it’s newly in the forefront of national conservative politics because of the pre-eminent role of the MAGA right in national conservative politics. But it’s a thing I think has always been there and is newly resurgent, you might say.
Cottle: Like you’re thinking Ronald Reagan, “welfare queens”?
Bouie: I’m thinking William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1950s expressing contempt for liberal professors. I’m thinking of Joseph McCarthy. If you start to really go back, I’m thinking of Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s.
Cottle: Now that’s a deep cut.
Bouie: Yeah. It’s been there.
Cottle: David, what about you?
David French: I learned something really fascinating when, a million years ago, I was president of the FIRE Foundation. At the time it was the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, now it’s Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
We were very scrupulously nonpartisan. In other words, if you were a liberal or conservative, it didn’t matter. We were going to defend your free speech rights. That meant I very deliberately went to conservative gatherings. I very deliberately went to more progressive gatherings. And one of the interesting themes that I saw on both sides was this: We think we are thinking analytically. We are thinking through the problems. And they’re emoting.
You always had this back and forth about who’s really thinking analytically versus who’s emoting. That’s an old thing. What’s happening now is, I think, more specific to the Trump phenomenon. I’m especially seeing, in evangelical spaces, they’re taking on the very notion of empathy itself, calling empathy, for example, a sin or talking about “toxic empathy.”
You talk about the predicament of a refugee fleeing Afghanistan, or the predicament of kids being cut off from U.S.A.I.D. and the response to that is that it is toxic empathy, that you just need to be more hard-nosed, as if the appeal to the heart is illegitimate.
And this is what I’ve begun to see, in parts of the Trump right, is this idea that anything that makes you feel sympathy or empathy for human beings in distress, especially if they’re human beings in distress because of the actions of the administration: “That’s toxic, that’s wrong, that’s making us weak.”
But the reality is that if you actually spend much time at all in these spaces, they are desperate for empathy for themselves and for their allies. And so part of me is thinking, what’s really going on here isn’t so much an attack on empathy itself, but a feeling by a lot of people that they’ve been left out of the empathy calculus. And so feeling neglected, feeling as if no one is caring for their concerns, they’re bulldozing the concept itself.
Cottle: This is what I was talking about starting out — which I completely take Jamelle’s point that it sounds like I’m picking on progressives. But I think there’s been an awful lot of energy spent, especially by progressives in the last few years, on making sure nobody gets left behind.
But at a time when there’s so much change in the traditional structures, the people who used to be completely on top, especially white conservative men, feel like they’re getting left behind and everybody else is paying more attention to, let’s say, immigrants or women. I think your whole thing about toxic empathy just reminds me of taking toxic masculinity and flipping it on its head. So we have to worry about it from a completely different angle.
Bouie: I find myself of two minds, especially as the conversation relates to conservative white men or just maybe men in general. It is absolutely true that we’re in this era of changing social norms, gender norms, changing ideas of what it means to be a man, and there’s not necessarily a script to follow and it may feel in fact that if you are committed or attached to very traditional notions of what manhood is, it may feel that there might not be very much space for you in this society.
But at the same time, if conservative men feel that not enough empathy is being extended to them, the question I have is: What specifically is the kind of disadvantage or crisis that you’re facing on the basis of being a conservative white man that demands sort of like special attention?
This is not to say that I don’t think people have legitimate feelings, even maybe legitimate feelings of grievance. But I think it’s also worth asking, what are we talking about here? The reason, for example, why there has been so much conversation about, say, Black maternal mortality rates is that they’re really high. It’s, like, an actual social problem.
Cottle: But that speaks to David’s point that it’s not rational. The thing that has always struck me is that traditionally Democrats have seemed to me like the party that’s always trying to talk about the head, while Republicans have always been much better at going for the gut.
So it’s not that you can list six ways in which policy is not working for you. It’s that you feel that something’s being done unfairly or that you feel like you’re falling behind. And in Trump’s case, he can tell you exactly whose fault that is.
Bouie: Yeah. The other part of my difficulty is I do think that there’s a complex relationship between what the public thinks and the behavior and actions of political elites.
And so there may be an inchoate sense of, “I’m not being appreciated in this society,” but that may not rise to the level of something that’s politically activated unless political elites begin to cultivate it and try to make it a salient political feeling.
And so part of me also wonders to what extent is this feeling itself a product of a deliberate and concerted effort to convince people that they live in a society that is actively trying to diminish masculinity or actively trying to tell white people that they’re bad. And if that’s the case, if part of this is supply-driven — like, there are political figures actively putting this into the world and media figures actively putting this into the world — then it’s hard to know what to do about it.
French: I would say I think of it as two different tracks. Here’s one that is a very legitimate critique from the right, and here’s one that’s very illegitimate.
The one that’s legitimate is really the attack on selective empathy. A valid critique, I think, of the way we approach empathy would be to say sometimes, “Hey, when we’re talking about the crisis on the border, if we’re emphasizing the very real, very serious plight of the people, both the lack of economic opportunity, the physical dangers that they face, the persecution they might face, or physical violence they might face back home. We should feel empathy for people who are crossing the border.”
But then there’s also a community in the border, within the border that is very heavily impacted by waves of migration, communities along the border that struggle to provide basic services. The strain on city services. In big cities like Chicago and New York, there were big strains on social services related to the wave of migration. And a lot of people felt that it was all running one way, that there were strains and difficulties. It gets expressed very bluntly on social media, where people would be like, “Where’s the empathy for Laken Riley and her family?” — the woman who was murdered by an illegal immigrant.
And in that circumstance, the actual approach is to be more holistic in our approach to empathy and to say, look, we need to take into account everybody’s experiences here, positive and negative. The illegitimate thing that is happening is rather than saying, “Hey, what we need is to be more holistic in our empathetic response,” people are instead saying, “We need to be more restrictive in our empathetic response.”
And U.S.A.I.D. example is that perfect example. U.S.A.I.D.’s budget is such a tiny fraction of the government’s total spending, with such a massive positive effect on real people’s lives. So the empathy calculation of who’s suffering in America because of U.S.A.I.D.: Well, nobody that I can discern. Nobody.
Who’s suffering as the result of U.S.A.I.D. being cut off? Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. So raising that suffering in this calculus is not an abuse of empathy. It’s exactly how it should be used. It’s exactly how we should awaken the conscience. And like so many issues we’re dealing with right now, there are some legitimate concerns that are being addressed with this brutal, blunt sledgehammer that’s actually making everything worse.
Cottle: This speaks to Jamelle’s point about chicken and egg to some degree. You do see elected officials saying, “Oh, well, we need to take care of people at home rather than send money overseas.” And we’ve done tons of surveys over the years that show Americans think the foreign aid budget of the country is about 10 times what it actually is.
And so you have this combination of misinformation and bad intent that then feeds this idea that if something bad is happening in your community, it must be because somebody else is getting your resources.
Bouie: David, you point to something that might even be a little larger than, or part of this attack on empathy, which is the way that I think the MAGA right is completely invested in a zero-sum notion of every single social interaction. Nothing can be a positive sum. Anything given to another group of people is necessarily taking something from you.
Cottle: Which is straight from Trump, right? Everything for him is transactional. It’s always a binary choice.
Bouie: Everything is zero-sum. And so you’re seeing this right now with the attacks on international students. The idea that we have to end visas for foreign students because they’re taking spots from American students, it’s a zero-sum thing. When in reality, anyone who’s even remotely familiar with college finances, knows that international students who pay full freight to American colleges and universities are basically a cross-subsidy for Americans with less opportunity.
You can charge a kid from China, you can charge a kid from Nigeria, $50,000 a year, and then use some of that to subsidize a kid from Emporia, Va., and give them a full-tuition scholarship. That’s crude, but that’s basically how the value proposition works. And so, in fact, it’s positive-sum. No one’s actually losing out here, and in fact, everyone gains. But that notion of, like, positive-sum interactions such that no one’s losing here is anathema to Trump, to the MAGA right, and to their vision of how the state ought to operate.
French: I’m glad you said that, that this view that if so-and-so is winning, I’m by necessity losing.
Similarly in the gender gap, there just seems to be this view that’s emerging that if women are gaining, men must be losing, and that is not the case at all. That is not the case at all. Women are not taking men’s jobs. We’re talking about women participating in an expanding economy, an expanding work force. And so this constant battle of each against all is the absolute enemy of empathy. That is what drains you of your empathy, is this idea that if somebody else is gaining, I must be losing.
Cottle: What I’m fascinated by, David, is your discussion of how Christian compassion is on the wane. Traditionally you’ve had Christians at the forefront of the abolitionist movement, civil rights; PEPFAR and the AIDS program overseas was definitely deep into George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism movement. And if that is going to die, that seems like it’s going to be a big shift for where we go from here.
French: There’s been a very big change, Michelle, that I’ve noticed in the last 20, 25 years. So if you go back to the Bush administration, one of Bush’s first executive orders was about this faith-based initiative where you would have compassionate Christian agencies like, say, a World Relief or a World Vision, or Samaritan’s Purse or others who were then able to receive funding from the government on an equal basis as secular relief agencies.
And the impulse behind this was entirely compassionate. It was: These are agencies doing real good in the world for the most vulnerable people. They need more resources. They shouldn’t be arbitrarily cut out from government grant making because they have a religious perspective and secular perspectives get government money.
You fast forward from 2004 to 2024, and all of a sudden you have a Republican administration cutting off a lot of this money to Christian relief agencies with Christians actually applauding. That’s a big change. It is a shift, and part of that shift is due to that coarsening of the Christian public in the Trump era. It is where you have seen that Trump has had more of an impact on the church than the church has had on Trump.
Bouie: To go back to an earlier point, there is supply and demand here, right? If I remember correctly, back in 2016, 2015, the Public Religion Research Institute put out some great surveys on how white evangelicals perceive their position in American culture. I think it’s kind of important to specify the white part of this because the dynamics are quite different in the Black church.
Many white evangelicals perceive themselves to be in a losing cultural position, that American society was passing them by. So that maybe, is the demand. That there is a real anxiety and worry and we can discuss how valid that was, but it was a real feeling. But then the supply comes in the form of Donald Trump making this explicit alliance with the most reactionary end of the conservative, evangelical world.
You sign up with Trump and he is a brute, like, clearly a guy with no particularly strong moral sense. Clearly a guy who sees everything in the zero-sum, exploit or be exploited kind of worldview. And it runs counter to your expressed values, but it is delivering political victories. And so you kind of have to make a choice whether explicitly or implicitly. Do I reject the political wins that I think are necessary to preserve my cultural position because I think this guy is just a bridge too far? Or do I rationalize it and say, “Well, you know, God chooses people who are flawed and Trump — — ”
Cottle: Oh, no, not the King David excuse — —
Bouie: Right, Trump is a flawed vessel for — —
French: Oh, the King David stuff is old news. It’s Jehu now.
Cottle: Sorry, I’m behind the curve.
Bouie: And I think that’s sort of the dynamic, and it’s hard for me to figure out how one moves past it. Because it seems, in the same way that sort of like Trump seems, or is, fully part of what it means to be a Republican now — such that there are at least two generations of young Republicans for whom Trump is the central figure, he is the Reagan. For a lot of evangelical Christians, support for Trump seems to be part of what it means to be an evangelical Christian. It’s to the point that you have, and this shows up in surveys too, people who identify as evangelical who do not attend church, but they do love Trump.
French: Going all the way back to 2016, I had so many white evangelicals talk to me about Trump and say, “I know he is not a good guy, but it’s the lesser evil. As a citizen, I have a responsibility: If I’ve got a greater evil and a lesser evil, I want the nation to at least follow the lesser evil.” And my response was like, how about not doing evil at all?
Cottle: Radical idea.
French: There’s this very powerful argument that you choose among the lesser evils, especially when people are cynical about politics to begin with. But here’s the thing that’s interesting about human beings: We don’t like to be on Team Lesser Evil. No one’s running around chanting, “Less-er e-vil, less-er e-vil.”
We want to be on the side that’s good. And if you can’t make Donald Trump good, you’ll just redefine Donald Trump as good. And this is part of what is all happening. If you can’t change the MAGA culture, they’re redefining the MAGA culture to try to assimilate it within Christianity, or to assimilate Christianity into the MAGA culture. And so that’s why I think it’s quite clear to me why these attacks on empathy are now coming up several years into the Trump era. And it’s because it’s this long, slow process of, “How do we make Trump good?” Well, you can’t make Trump good, so how do you change our definition of what is good to meet Trump?
Bouie: But I feel compelled also to say that like this has kind of been a part of American religion for a long time.
One movie I like a lot is “Elmer Gantry,” from 1960, which is based off a Sinclair Lewis book from 1927. But it’s basically about this, a charlatan using revivalist religion for their own gain and also putting forth a vision of that religion as very transactional. Like so many things in our culture, there’s new permutations of it, but there are deep roots. There’s a way in which, like, all of this is just so deeply American, in the bad ways.
Cottle: That’s right.
Bouie: But nonetheless deeply American.
The other thing I wanted to say, and this kind of relates to our conversation about zero-sum thinking, is that it has been interesting to observe the discussion over the “big beautiful bill” in the House and the Senate, which cuts hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Cottle: But it’s all waste and fraud, Jamelle. It’s all waste and fraud.
Bouie: There’s this talk of “We’re not spending money on Americans,” and then when it’s time to spend money on Americans, it’s like, “Well, it’s all waste and fraud that we’re spending.” And it does feel like from, at least the top, it feels like a shell game, right? This really is all just a way to get people to sign on to the upward distribution of their tax dollars so that, frankly, Donald Trump and his kids can pay a little less to Uncle Sam, inasmuch as they pay anything Uncle Sam to begin with.
Cottle: So let’s flip that. In many ways the Democratic Party built its platform on the idea that people should have empathy for the least well-off in society. So how should they be countering this? And to what degree do we think in this moment that’s actually playing into why they have crashing popularity, like ——
Bouie: I think so as far as their crashing popularity goes, I kind of think it’s a function of the fact that they kind of just seem like weenies right now — not have much fight about them.
But I do think there’s this larger cultural challenge. Declining social trust means a lot of things, but, like, one of the things that also means that it’s just tough to sell to people the idea that we’re going to take some tax dollars from you to provide broad benefits that will help you. We’re going to help you, middle-income person, but we’re also going to spend money on helping working people who don’t necessarily have jobs that provide health insurance, or we’re going to spend it on children who don’t necessarily have access to regular healthy meals. It’s hard to sell that to people because you don’t have a captive audience, right?
You make this pitch and then you have the other side saying, well, this is all going to waste and fraud, it’s going to lazy people, it’s going to layabouts, etc., etc. And so I think part of the challenge — for not just Democrats, but American liberalism — is how do you rebuild a higher-trust society, one where people can buy in to a redistributive program?
Part of that is going to be done just by Democrats in places where they have power delivering services effectively and efficiently. If the government’s working well, people are going to be more inclined to trust the government to do things. That’s part of the secret sauce of the New Deal, is that, like, a lot of those things ran pretty well and persuaded people that they should support more benefits. But the other part of it has to be cultural. And that’s I think that’s the big challenge. It’s, like, there’s a broad cultural push toward a kind of very self-focused, anti-community kind of way of being.
I’m on TikTok too much, and its hustle culture is a big thing and getting rich off crypto, which are things that are ultimately like very inwardly focused. Like, you’re not going to get ahead by collaboration and community with other people. You’re going to get ahead by essentially either getting in on something before other people do and letting them hold the bag when you, when you profit, or by kind of dominating other people. And those are not attitudes conducive to pro-social policy of any kind.
French: Look, we have a highly tribalistic politics right now. We have parties that are very good at — well, maybe very good is an overstatement; they’re not very good at much of anything. But to the extent they have competence, they have a core competence in delivering to their core constituencies some of the goodies that the core constituents demand.
So it’s not crazy for people to look at politics and think, oh, this is all transactional because politics is being treated in this very transactional way. Democrats have long won more female voters than male voters. So over time, a perception takes hold that the Democratic Party likes women voters and doubles down on taking care of women and neglects or leaves men behind.
And I’ve been in rooms where I will talk about the plight of young boys in this country. I’m not talking about the boys who are wealthy and elite. We all know that men are still overrepresented in the boardrooms and that the top ranks of various tiers of society. I’m talking about the big, broad bulk of young boys in this country. You’re looking at much less academic achievement than girls. Much greater disciplinary problems, much higher suicide rates, much higher rates of anxiety, depression, A.D.H.D., etc.
And I have been in some left-leaning spaces where this look of skepticism comes over your face like, “Boys? This is a patriarchal society. Boys are on top in the society. What are you talking about?” And I have seen a lack of empathy in left-leaning spaces for what’s happening with young men.
Now that’s changing — it’s changing. And the sad thing is, though, I think one reason it’s changing is because the lack of empathy for boys has grown so profound that the gender gap is one of the things that gave Trump the presidency. And so the shock of the political loss has caused people to sort of re-evaluate their approach. But it shouldn’t have to take that.
I have seen in these left-leaning spaces, in much the same way I see in a lot of right-leaning spaces outright scorn for women. That’s a part of this attack on empathy that we’ve not talked about yet. It is rooted — especially in some of these more hard-core fundamentalist evangelical spaces — in a real scorn for what they perceive as a feminine characteristic. Empathy is a feminine characteristic. And so anything feminine needs to be purged from government and leadership. So you see that pro-male perspective of the G.O.P. morphing into anti-female. And I have seen the pro-female move on the left morphing into anti-male.
Cottle: Let me just take one step back. There’s an argument to be made that it’s hard to get people to worry about big-picture ideas like social justice, climate, immigration or even foreign aid when they’re struggling to meet their basic daily needs. And we had just come out of a pandemic hangover and inflation had a big bite.
The system was not working for a lot of people, and the Biden administration did not cover itself in glory in terms of letting people know that it felt their pain. So when people are feeling better about the economy again, do we think that we will see a return of compassion? Or have we gone beyond that and we’ll have to actively work to claw it back?
French: I don’t think we’ll see it. Let me put it this way, Michelle: The people who are driving this attack on empathy are not suffering people. They’re the influencers and the leaders and the ministry leader. I have not seen very many poor people attacking empathy.
What I’ve seen are wealthy MAGA influencers, influential MAGA influencers attacking empathy. Now, that’s not to say the whole Trump coalition is like that. There’s a bunch of working-class people and the Trump coalition who do struggle a lot, but you know what? They’re not on Twitter talking and arguing about empathy. They got bigger things to do with their lives.
Cottle: Jamelle, you got any thoughts on bringing compassion back?
Bouie: I tend to see things as quite cyclical. So I don’t know what will bring it back, but in the same way that American culture does contain antecedents and strains that are producing this anti-empathy moment, there are real traditions of social solidarity and community feeling that may reassert themselves.
And I think they might. I think they might. But that’s obviously not going to be an automatic thing. It’s going to be political work done to re-force them back into our mainstream political culture. And it might just have to happen once Trump fades from the scene.
French: And also it could happen through — —
Cottle: And the Democrats stop being weenies, huh?
Bouie: Yes.
French: Also, let’s not forget the influence of an American pope who has a very different ethos than the one that we’ve been talking about.
Cottle: I don’t want to put that kind of pressure on the pope. That’s a lot of pressure to put on the pope, David.
French: He’s the pope, he can handle it.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker, Sonia Herrero and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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