Part 2: Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy.
Edited from The Guardian article by
Julia Carrie Wong, April 8, 2025
What is happening on the American right is on an entirely different scale. Susan Lanzoni, a historian of psychology and author of Empathy: A History, said by email that through all her research into the intellectual history of empathy, she had “never seen empathy vilified in the way it has been in these current sources”.
“The disparagement of empathy is the flip side, I believe, of a deliberate effort to set up a permission structure to dehumanize others, and to narrow the definition of who should be included in a democratic state, or in a Christian community,” she said. “To me, this disparagement marks a step in the destruction of our multicultural democracy, and provides a path from the verbal dehumanization of others to open discrimination and maltreatment.”
Indeed, the rightwing critique of empathy is not an attempt to find a better way to achieve altruistic ends; it’s an excuse to turn away from altruism entirely. We are witnessing the construction of the ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale. While the religious right attends to a moral justification, the secular right is hard at work on a pseudoscientific one. Meanwhile, the Maga movement has created an online culture that is steeped in an aesthetic of anti-empathy, from dismissing fellow human beings as “NPCs” (or non-player characters) to joking about relaxing to the “ASMR” sounds of human bondage.
For them, empathy assumes the power of a phantasmagoric threat – it can subvert God’s will, corrupt the church, and end western civilization as we know it. The Christian and patriotic public must harden their hearts to any empathy that might prevent them from supporting the actions needed to “save” America – whether they be cutting off millions of people from live-saving medication, firing tens of thousands of public servants, threatening to invade sovereign countries, or rounding up and deporting the millions of workers on whose backs the entire economy rests. The fabrication of an existential threat in order to motivate popular support for otherwise unsupportable actions is a classic tactic of fascist regimes. Where Hitler focused on the supposedly all-powerful Jews, Trump has presented his supporters with a rotating cast of bogeymen, including Muslims, immigrants, transgender people, critical race theorists, federal employees and feminists. Conveniently, empathy manages to unite them all.
If there is any consolation, it is perhaps in the fact that such work is even necessary.
Take Jesse Watters, the shock jock of Fox News who built a career by ambushing people and filming their humiliation. As hard-hearted a Trump supporter as they come, Watters was nevertheless shaken in his enthusiasm for Musk’s federal job cuts when they hit first a veteran friend of his. “We just need to be a little bit less callous with the way … we talk about Doge-ing people,” he said on Fox News. “I finally found one person I knew that got Doged and it hit me in the heart.”
Watters’ fit of compassion for his personal acquaintances was short-lived, but impactful, according to the Atlantic, which reported that Watters’ viral plea for a bit more empathy bothered Trump so much that he took his “first steps to rein in Musk’s powers”. Trump’s 100 days of frantic democratic destruction continue apace, but it seems noteworthy that he sensed in Watters’ reluctant admission to caring about other people a vulnerability that could prove to be his achilles heel.
Empathy is not a sin, a toxin, or an evolutionary dead end. It is a tool, and like all tools it can be a weapon. We are going to need it.
Julia Carrie Wong, April 8, 2025
What is happening on the American right is on an entirely different scale. Susan Lanzoni, a historian of psychology and author of Empathy: A History, said by email that through all her research into the intellectual history of empathy, she had “never seen empathy vilified in the way it has been in these current sources”.
“The disparagement of empathy is the flip side, I believe, of a deliberate effort to set up a permission structure to dehumanize others, and to narrow the definition of who should be included in a democratic state, or in a Christian community,” she said. “To me, this disparagement marks a step in the destruction of our multicultural democracy, and provides a path from the verbal dehumanization of others to open discrimination and maltreatment.”
Indeed, the rightwing critique of empathy is not an attempt to find a better way to achieve altruistic ends; it’s an excuse to turn away from altruism entirely. We are witnessing the construction of the ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale. While the religious right attends to a moral justification, the secular right is hard at work on a pseudoscientific one. Meanwhile, the Maga movement has created an online culture that is steeped in an aesthetic of anti-empathy, from dismissing fellow human beings as “NPCs” (or non-player characters) to joking about relaxing to the “ASMR” sounds of human bondage.
For them, empathy assumes the power of a phantasmagoric threat – it can subvert God’s will, corrupt the church, and end western civilization as we know it. The Christian and patriotic public must harden their hearts to any empathy that might prevent them from supporting the actions needed to “save” America – whether they be cutting off millions of people from live-saving medication, firing tens of thousands of public servants, threatening to invade sovereign countries, or rounding up and deporting the millions of workers on whose backs the entire economy rests. The fabrication of an existential threat in order to motivate popular support for otherwise unsupportable actions is a classic tactic of fascist regimes. Where Hitler focused on the supposedly all-powerful Jews, Trump has presented his supporters with a rotating cast of bogeymen, including Muslims, immigrants, transgender people, critical race theorists, federal employees and feminists. Conveniently, empathy manages to unite them all.
If there is any consolation, it is perhaps in the fact that such work is even necessary.
Take Jesse Watters, the shock jock of Fox News who built a career by ambushing people and filming their humiliation. As hard-hearted a Trump supporter as they come, Watters was nevertheless shaken in his enthusiasm for Musk’s federal job cuts when they hit first a veteran friend of his. “We just need to be a little bit less callous with the way … we talk about Doge-ing people,” he said on Fox News. “I finally found one person I knew that got Doged and it hit me in the heart.”
Watters’ fit of compassion for his personal acquaintances was short-lived, but impactful, according to the Atlantic, which reported that Watters’ viral plea for a bit more empathy bothered Trump so much that he took his “first steps to rein in Musk’s powers”. Trump’s 100 days of frantic democratic destruction continue apace, but it seems noteworthy that he sensed in Watters’ reluctant admission to caring about other people a vulnerability that could prove to be his achilles heel.
Empathy is not a sin, a toxin, or an evolutionary dead end. It is a tool, and like all tools it can be a weapon. We are going to need it.
