How the American right came to hate empathy

Of the qualities the American right has come to despise in the left, empathy is the most puzzling. Boy, do they hate it. A stream of books in recent years has supplemented constant podcast and social-media chatter about what is seen as nothing less than, well, a sin. In 2025 „Leadership and the Sin of Empathy”, by Joe Rigney, came hot on the heels of the previous year’s bestselling „Toxic Empathy”, by Allie Beth Stuckey. This May brought „Suicidal Empathy”, an instant and persistent bestseller by Gad Saad, a professor of marketing and a podcaster. Mr Saad’s sales have no doubt been boosted by the plug on his cover from Elon Musk, who warns that „Western civilisation is doomed” unless Mr Saad’s message is heeded and „actions are taken that are hard but necessary for survival”.

The previous Republican president, George W. Bush, called himself a „compassionate conservative”, but that’s not why this horror of empathy is puzzling; condemning empathy is one more way for today’s Republicans to erase him. It is puzzling instead because a surfeit of understanding of the needs of others would seem a poor explanation for Democrats’ dismal approval ratings, even as Donald Trump alienates most Americans by enriching himself, gilding Washington and waging war without a strategy.

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In fact, for some years a case could be made—Lexington has tried to make it—that the left’s problem has been a lack of empathy: for Americans displaced by technology and trade; for those vulnerable to crime; for those alarmed by chaos at the border; for those without a college degree; for those frustrated at paying high taxes for poor government services; for those anxious that Joe Biden was too old to serve a second term; for everyone who supports Mr Trump. When it comes to empathy, if anyone has been committing suicide, it is the Democratic Party. In any case, the West seems pretty safe these days from too much of the stuff.

Yet Mr Saad fears „the death of the West at the Altar of Infinite Tolerance and Orgiastic Empathy”. A Jew who, as a child, fled with his family from Lebanon to Canada at the outbreak of civil war in 1975, he is particularly alarmed by tolerance for Muslim immigration. But he also sees evidence of suicidal empathy in everything from covid restrictions to the „endless bike lanes” of Montreal, the fruit of „climate-based orgiastic emotional incontinence” (yes, „orgiastic” seems to be his favourite word, intriguingly). Just what Hunter Biden’s laptop has to do with suicidal empathy is unclear. But Mr Saad squeezes it in, along with language policing, coddling criminals and academic papers such as „Humanising Paedophilia as Stigma Reduction”.

While mocking „empathic income equality”, Mr Saad reveals real tenderness towards one victim of too little empathy. „Whenever I air my frustration on social media at the amount of taxes that I pay, many people are not in the least bit sympathetic,” he complains. „They are aghast that I would ‘whine’.” In fact, Mr Saad likes empathy when bestowed upon the right people. A student of evolutionary psychology, he argues that natural selection primed humans to direct empathy to those closest to them. He is right about that. Back in hunter-gatherer days empathy helped them sort allies from foes and strengthen bonds within the tribe.

To reinforce such dynamics, humans developed some cognitive biases, including „attribution error”, which prompts them to excuse bad things that allies do as a product of circumstances, and to condemn bad things adversaries do as evidence of low character. Mr Saad displays this bias: he writes that it is „statistically expected” that a mass-deportation programme might produce „singular examples of incorrect deportations”. But he issues no such statistical pardon for crimes committed by illegal immigrants, implicitly tarring all with one brush. He also does not castigate Republican leaders for empathy they have shown towards antisemitic podcasters or white nationalist protesters. In keeping with his view of empathy, and usefully for the sale of books, Mr Saad has chosen his tribe. Empathy in the form he embraces, as in the form he decries on the left, is a mighty engine of polarisation.

What’s so scary about peace, love and understanding?

As information technology has advanced, from printed books like Mr Saad’s to the X platform owned by Mr Musk, humans have proved ingenious at using it to increase the tribalising power of empathy. The trouble is that these days they tend not to live in hunter-gatherer societies. When Americans and Iranians cannot understand each other well enough to wage war effectively, much less make peace, a more expansive conception of empathy ought to be in order: not „I feel your pain” emotional empathy, but cognitive empathy, or what psychologists call „theory of mind”—the ability to infer how someone else sees the world.

This is a central theme of another new book by a student of evolutionary psychology, „The God Test” by Robert Wright. Surveying the onrush of artificial intelligence, Mr Wright (a former colleague of Lexington’s) warns that obsequious AI agents serving as friends and advisers could prove profoundly tribalising. Moreover, in making a persuasive case that some form of superintelligence could arrive within a decade, Mr Wright argues that the very survival of the species may now depend on whether it can overcome its rivalrous instincts—among companies, parties and nations. They must find ways to collaborate to put guardrails in place, to prevent potential catastrophe and to realise AI’s potential blessings. „The artificial intelligence revolution demands nothing less than a revolution in human understanding: an understanding of humans by humans,” he writes. He holds out hope that the common threat could unite humanity, but worries that „the gap between where our species is and where it needs to be is almost comically vast.” One can certainly empathise.

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