In a chilling essay for The Guardian newspaper, Julia Carrie Wong unpacks the authoritarian Republican Party’s growing war on empathy.
Republicans talk about empathy everywhere and portray it as harmful — from Elon Musk’s technocratic disdain to evangelical theologians recasting compassion as a sin.
Writes Wong:
The idea that empathy is actually bad has also been gaining traction among white evangelical Christians in the US, some of whom have begun to recast the pangs of empathy that might complicate their support for Donald Trump and his agenda as a “sin” or “toxin”. The debate has emerged among Catholics too, with JD Vance recently using the medieval Catholic concept of “ordo amoris” to justify the Trump administration’s policies on immigration and foreign aid.
The idea of supposed Christians opposing empathy is especially telling. Jesus Christ quite famously preached in favor of empathy, and it is not clear why anyone who sides with Musk and Trump over Christ can still claim to be a Christian.
As Republicans seek to dehumanize the vulnerable in defense of authoritarian politics, Wong’s piece lays bare the crucial role of empathy, which Republicans like Musk seek to reframe as a threat to civilization. Their war on empathy tells us everything we need to know where these people want to take us.
Please read the entire piece by clicking below:
Julia Carrie Wong
We write a lot about empathy here at FrameLab. As Dr. George Lakoff has said, democracy depends on empathy:
American democracy is based on empathy — citizens caring about other citizens and working through their government to provide public resources for all, making both decent lives and flourishing markets possible.
Why is empathy so crucial?
The logic is simple: Empathy is why we have the values of freedom, fairness, and equality – for everyone, not just for certain individuals. If we put ourselves in the shoes of others, we will want them to be free and treated fairly. Empathy with all leads to equality: no one should be treated worse than anyone else. Empathy leads us to democracy: to avoid being subject indefinitely to the whims of an oppressive and unfair ruler, we need to be able to choose who governs us and we need a government of laws.
Remember: The war on empathy is a war on democracy. It's important to understand this and to talk about it. By declaring war on empathy, these authoritarians are bringing unconscious issues to the forefront of American politics.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how the MAGA movement has begun to explicitly depict Donald Trump as a strict “Daddy” figure who will dole out punishment to a nation in need of discipline. This is another example of making unconscious issues into conscious ones — forcing Americans to think about the hidden ideas structuring our politics.
Why are they doing this? My guess is that, given the urgency of their fascist project, they are seeking to activate and polarize the Republican base in dramatic ways. Subtle tactics no longer have the desired effect, so they are exposing the rotten underbelly of their ideology. They must reframe empathy as a negative in order to create support for their unpopular dismantling of American government.
What can we do? We must also bring these unconscious issues into the light. Let's create a societal debate on the importance of empathy and its crucial role in our democracy. Without empathy, there is no democracy — and that is what's at the core of the war on empathy.
FrameLab
Gil Duran
The 'Dark Side' of Empathy?
While authoritarians like Elon Musk make war on empathy, they also use empathy to their own advantage. In today's New York Times, Michael Ventura — author of Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership — argues that some of the people who now openly despise empathy are quite adept at weaponizing it:
Across tech, media and politics, we’re witnessing a rise in leaders who reject empathy rhetorically while using it tactically. They discredit this vital skill as weakness, yet fine-tune their messaging to trigger precisely the reactions they need from investors, voters and followers. We’ve heard the ideological dog whistles. We’ve witnessed the fear-mongering and overreach shrouded in the guise of protecting democracy.
Here's a gift link to read the entire piece, “The Dark Side of Empathy”