Empathy
Relating to others' feelings is considered a weakness by the truly weak among us.
1) Following the president’s lead, our elected fossils are making policy on fossil fuels, which seems age-appropriate. By insisting that we follow the energy map created in the 1950’s we are handing our energy future over to the Chinese. How is it that our fossil’s maps are so out of date?
2) In 2013, all 217 GOP representatives vote to slash funds intended to feed the hungry by $40 Billion. No Democrats came along.
Both examples point to the empathy question, so I took a deep dive.
Psychologist Christopher Armitage cites Stephen Morris in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, which found that empathy has become “a hallmark of the political left,” with empathy scores consistently predicting liberal attitudes across dozens of studies. The Pew Research Center’s 2014 data is particularly telling: 86% of consistently liberal parents say teaching empathy is “especially important” for children, compared to just 55% of consistently conservative parents, a 31-point gap in valuing compassion itself.
Other studies confirm the fact that empathy is a liberal trait. When Elon Musk said that the real problem with Western civilization is empathy—as in too much caring for others—he was preaching psychological and political orthodoxy grounded in MAGA thinking.
“When researchers at Aalto University in Finland (Zebarjadi et al., 2023) put conservatives and liberals in magnetoencephalography scanners while asking them to imagine others’ suffering, they found something striking: conservative brains literally showed less activation in empathy-related regions, specifically the temporal-parietal junction. The difference was visible on the scans, liberal brains showing significantly stronger neural responses to others’ pain, while conservative brains remained comparatively muted.
“States with abortion bans have maternal mortality rates 62% higher than states protecting reproductive rights. Women are dying from policies enacted by legislators who lack empathy for strangers.”
He was a prison psychologist for a number of years. Since about 65% of prison inmates suffer from personality disorders (no surprise, that), he was thus unsurprised to find them consistently rooting for the meanest and most despicable villains on TV, but the really telling observation was that when inmates sat around watching TV, the shows they were most interested in were on Fox News Channel. He observed that they hung on every fawning word the hosts said about Donald Trump, and that the sex offenders were particularly sympathetic (not empathetic) to Trump’s excuses about his dalliances, including walking unannounced through beauty pageant dressing rooms, and his glee at telling Billy Bush in the infamous Access Hollywood outtake, how he felt entitled to intimately grope women without invitation.
Dr. Armitage goes on to explain the empathy gap that has gripped MAGA Republicans (I can’t bring myself to call them conservative) members of Congress.
Suddenly, the cuts in medical/cancer research, the refusal to comply with court orders to fund SNAP during the shutdown, and now the retraction of funds to keep the homeless off the streets begins to make sense in a twisty-logic kind of way.
This final thought from Dr. Armitage: “American conservatism has become an ideology that systematically suppresses empathy. It rewards the prison mentality: dominate or be dominated, trust only your tribe, see kindness as weakness. It’s created a political movement that mirrors the psychological dynamics of incarceration, complete with gang colors in the form of red hats and protection rackets in the form of vote-for-us-or-the-criminals-will-get-you rhetoric.”
This demonstrable lack of empathy is exhibited in the Heritage Foundation’s response to Sean Hannity’s fawning interview of Holocaust-denying, self-proclaimed Hitler fanboy, Nick Fuentes. Fuentes is the young racist, misogynist, antisemite, who casually told Hannity about the “world’s Jew problem,” and was met with a nodding head. Then, in an incredibly tone-deaf effort to somehow sanitize that which had been Hannitized, Heritage president, Kevin Roberts, lauded Hannity as someone who is and always will be Heritage’s friend. Suffice to say Roberts went way out on a limb, and having conveniently brought a saw with him, proceeded to tumble unceremoniously to the ground where he was assailed by some of his own people, a number of whom resigned in protest. I assume they suffered from the empathy gene.
Whether Roberts is now hanging by thread as the leader of the Heritage Foundation, is subject to interpretation. Some say he’s a goner, while others say he is pointing the way forward for the think tank. I hope it’s the former, but fear it’s the latter.
It’s a muddy picture, not unlike the current internal squabble at the White House over the extremely slanted Russia Wins/Ukraine Loses, 28-point peace plan that was either translated from the original Russian, or was written by the administration, depending on whether you ask Putin bootlicker JD Vance, or his supposed 2028 presidential rival, Little Marco Rubio.
Either way, it sure looks like we need more empathy—not less.
©2025 Jon Sinton
Interesting stats. Make me wonder whether it’s a chicken or egg thing but I see another parallel: Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387751558_Kohlberg's_Stages_of_Moral_Development
Essentially, stage 1 is infancy where ME is the whole world. Stage 2 is where there is “me AND other, though the purpose of “Other” is what other can do for ME.
Stage 3 is more like the golden rule where the relationship is more reciprocal (empathy comes here)
Higher levels have to do with recognizing a place within greater society and at the top level (5 or 6) it’s more Gandhi-like prior to society.
In school where rules and obedience are ingrained in younger grades students move from level 1 to 2. And in our media, it’s pretty much stuck at level 2.
To bring folks from 2 to 3 the technique used in “just community schools” was to have equal participation in “dilemma discussions” where there was no absolutely “right answer” but a greater appreciation of different points of view.
At stage 3 with collaborative communication real citizenship in a free society becomes possible.
But after leaving school in the wrong environment (work, media influence, tribal clique for example) it becomes too easy to slip back from level 3 to 2.
That’s the issue. In a myself-driven environment there’s little hope for a thriving Democracy. Our schools need to turn out not just worker bees but real citizens and our communicators and their licensees need to take real responsibility to the communities they serve rather than only serving up people to advertisers and stockholders.
Oh, it’s a tall order and it will pay off handsomely down the line (beyond the bottom line) but without taking and filling the tall order it looks grim for the American experiment. Jus’ sayin’.
Well argued, as usual, Jon. The narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths have found a comfy home of hate in the MAGA world.