The Opinions - Why Politics Feels So Cruel Right Now

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

In this episode, 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.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur, Kristina Samulewski and Jillian Weinberger. 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Michelle Cottle, and I cover National Politics for Times Opinion. And I'm sitting with my fabulous colleagues, the columnists David French and Jamel Bowie. So, hi guys. Hey, guys. Hello. So today I want us to talk about something of a vibe shift that seems to be happening right now in politics.

So, like, we frequently talk about how politics follows culture. And I feel like we're seeing a prime example of this and what might be darkly characterized as the death of empathy. So hear me out. I think that when people are feeling sour or anxious, they do not want to be lectured that other people have it worse than they do. They want to be told that they are justified and being upset and aggrieved, that as Bill Clinton used to talk about,

their leaders feel their pain, and it's even better if they are given a convenient group to blame for their troubles. So now, for years, progressives have engaged in a competition of which subgroup is the most oppressed in the hierarchy of intersectionality

who has the most right to be upset, which I think has put conservative men in particular on the defensive at a time when they're already freaked out about shifting social and economic hierarchy. So you've got a lot of people who are tired of feeling guilty, and they are very open to the idea that empathy or compassion is, in fact, a weakness. So I want to know if you guys are seeing this, and if so, where and when have you noticed the shift? I think I disagree somewhat with the premise that American progressives have been engaged in this sort of hierarchical, this game of establishing a hierarchy of oppression.

I think that is a unfriendly gloss on sort of like maybe progressive concern with marginalized people. But just speaking as someone who's like around progressives and has been for a long time, that's like not really something I've ever perceived. But setting that aside, I do think that there is sort of a disdain for empathy, but I don't necessarily see that as sort of like a novel phenomena of American politics in this moment. And I recently read a really interesting book, America Last by an author whose name I cannot recall at the moment. But it's sort of a history of the American right in a lot of ways. It's not the conservative movement, but sort of the larger right over time. And you see antecedents to this kind of contempt for empathy, going back to like the 1920s and 30s.

So I don't think it's new. I do think that it's newly in the forefront of like national conservative politics because of, you know, the preeminent role of kind of the MAGA right in national conservative politics. But it's a thing I think it's always been there and is. is newly resurgent, you might say. So, like, you're thinking Ronald Reagan, welfare queens? I'm thinking, you know, Buckley in the 50s, sort of expressing contempt for, you know, liberal professors. I'm thinking of McCarthy. I'm, you know, if you start to really go back, I'm thinking of Charles Lindbergh in the 1930.

It's like... Oh, now that's a deep cut. Yeah, it's been there. David, what about you? You know, I learned something really fascinating when I, years ago, a million years ago, I was president of fire foundation at the time as foundation for individual rights and education. Now it's foundation for individual rights and expression. And we were very, very, 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. And so that meant I very deliberately went to conservative gatherings. I very deliberately went to more. more progressive gatherings. And one of the interesting themes that I saw in both sides was this, we think clearly, we are thinking analytically, we're thinking through the problems, and they're emoting. And so you kind of always had this like back and forth about who's really thinking

analytically here versus who's emoting. But that's an old thing. What's happening now is I think more specific to the Trump phenomenon, and 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. And you talk about, like, the predicament of a refugee fleeing Afghanistan or the predicament of kids cut off from help from USAID. And then the response to that is this is that toxic empathy, that you just need to be more hard-nosed, as if the appeal to the heart is all by itself, 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 sort of 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. Well, this is what I was talking about starting out, which I completely take Jamal'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, about making sure nobody gets left behind. But at a time when there's so much change in the traditional structures, then the people who you, you know, used to be completely on top, especially quite conservative men, feel like they're getting left behind and everybody else is paying more attention to, say, you know, immigrants, women, you know,

like, I think your whole thing about toxic empathy just reminds me of, like, taking toxic masculinity and flipping it on its head. So we have to worry about it from a completely, completely different angle. I find myself of two minds, especially as the conversation relates to maybe conservative white men, or just maybe men in general, right? That it is absolutely true that sort of like we're in this time, 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, you know, 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, like the question I have is sort of like, 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, you know? 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 just sort of like, what are we talking about here? Like the reason, for example, why there was so much conversation or 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.

But that speaks to David's point that it's not rational. It's like, and so the thing that has always struck me is that traditionally Democrats have struck me as 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. Yeah. Part of my, the other part of my difficulty is, like, I do think that there's a complex relationship between what a public thinks and the behavior and actions of political elites. And so there may be, right, like a sense of feeling. in co-it sense of, you know, I'm not being appreciated in the society. But that may not rise to the level of something that's, like, politically activated unless, like, political elites begin to cultivate it and, like, try to make it a salient sort of political feeling. And so part of me also wonders, like, to what extent is this feeling itself a product of, like,

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, you know, tell white people that they're bad. And if that's the case, if part of this is supply driven, right? Like there's these, there are political figures actively putting this into the world, media figures actively putting this into the world, then it's hard to think about what, what to do about it, you know? I would say, I think of it two different tracks. Here's one that is very legitimate critique from the right, and here's one that's very illegitimate.

The one that's legitimate is really, as I said earlier, the attack on selective empathy. So one way of that I think it's a valid critique of the way we approach empathy sometimes would be to say, 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. We should. 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.

And a lot of people felt that it was all running one way, that there were strains and difficulties and that you get this on, say, it gets expressed very bluntly on social media where people would be like, where's the empathy for Lake and Riley and her family, you know, this 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 to say, look, we need to take into account everybody's experiences here, positive and negative. This illegitimate thing that is happening is rather than sort of saying, hey, what we need is to be more holistic in our empathetic response, it is to say we need to be more restrictive in our empathetic response.

In other words, in the USAID example, is that perfect example. USAID's budget is such a tiny fraction of the government's spent total spending with such massive positive effect on real people's lives that that empathy calculation, who's suffering in America because of USAID will nobody that I can discern? nobody who's suffering as a result of at USAID being cut off hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are suffering so raising that suffering in this calculus is not a abuse of empathy it's exactly how it should be used it's exactly how we should awaken the conscience and so like so many issues we're dealing with right now we've had a legit I think there are some legitimate concerns

that are being addressed with this brutal, blunt sledgehammer that's actually ending up making everything worse. Well, this speaks to Jamel's point about chicken and an egg to some degree. You do see people out there elected officials saying, oh, well, we need to take care of people at home rather than send money overseas. And we've done millions of surveys, not millions, but 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. Yeah, I think, David, you point to something that might even be a little larger than, or part of this attack on empathy, which is sort of the way that, the way that I think the MAGA right is completely invested of sort of a zero-sum notion of every single social interaction, right? There's nothing can be positive sum, right?

There's no anything given to another group of people is necessarily taking something from you. Which is straight from Trump, right? Everything from him is transactional. There's always, yeah, it's always a binary choice. Everything is zero-sum. And so you're seeing this right now with the attacks on, international students, right? We have to end visas for foreign students because they're taking spots from American students.

It's a zero-something. But in reality, right, like anyone who's even, like, remotely familiar with colleges, college finances, knows that international students who pay full fright to American colleges and universities are basically a cross-subsidy for Americans with, like, less opportunity, right? You can charge a kid from China. you can charge a kid from Nigeria, you know, $50,000 a year, and then use some of that to subsidize a kid. I'm thinking I'm going to use a Virginia example, subsidize a kid from Emporia, Virginia down in the south part of the state, and give them a full tuition scholarship. Like that's crude, but that's basically how the value proposition works.

And so, in fact, it's positive sum, right? Like, no one's actually losing out here, and in fact, everyone gains. but that notion of like positive some interactions such that you don't, no one's losing here. It's just sort of anathema to Trump, to the Maga Right, to their vision of how the state ought to operate. I'm glad you said that, that this few that if so-and-so is winning, I'm by necessity losing.

Similarly, in the battle, 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. If women are not taking men's jobs, we're talking about women participating in an expanding economy, an expanding workforce. 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. What I'm fascinated by, David, is your discussion of how Christian compassion is on the wane.

Because, you know, traditionally you've had the Christians at the forefront of the abolitionist movements and rights, all kinds of. PEPFAR, 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. There's been a very big change, Michelle, that I have 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 Samaritans 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 grantmaking because they have a religious perspective and secular perspectives get government money.

And so 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. I think, to go back to an earlier point, that's sort of there is supply and demand here, right? So if I remember correctly, back in 2016, 2015, the Public Religion Research Institute put out some great surveys on just sort of 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. But many white evangelicals perceive themselves to be in a losing cultural position, right, that like the American society was passing them by. So that maybe is like the demand, right, that there is real anxiety and worry. And we can, you know, you 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, you know, the most reaction. end of the conservative evangelical world. You sign up with Trump, and he's 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 road view, and that 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. Like, 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, you know, Trump. Not the King David excuse. Trump, right. Trump is a flawed vessel for. The King David stuff is old news. It's Jayhu now. Well, yeah. Sorry.

Sorry, I'm behind the curve. And I think that's sort of the dynamic. 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 kind of 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, like support for Trump seems to be part of what it means to be an evangelical Christian.

To the point that you have, and this shows up in surveys too, people who identify as evangelical, but do not attend church. But they do love Trump. Going all the way back to 2016, I had so many white evangelicals talk to me about Trump and say, I know he's 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 pursue the lesser evil, follow the lesser evil than the greater evil. And my response was like, how about not doing evil at all? But, you know, look, there's this very powerful argument that you choose amongst 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. Like, no one's running around chanting, lesser evil, lesser evil. We want to be on the side that's good. So, 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 is if you can't change the maga culture, they're redefining the maga culture to try to assimilate it within Christian, or to assimilate Christianity into the Maga culture. they're redefining the maga culture to try to assimilate it within christian 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. But I feel compelled to say that, like, this has kind of been a part of, like, American religion for a long time. Like, one of a movie I like a lot is Elmer Gantry from 1960, which is based off of a Sinclair Lewis book from 1927 that is basically about this, basically about, like, you

know, charlatans using revivalist religion for their own gain and also putting forth a vision of that religion that's, like, very transactional. Like so many things I think in our culture, there's like new permutations of it, but there are deep roots. There's a way in which all of this is just so deeply American, in the bad ways. 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 Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program. And that, you know, there's a 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, from like, not so much from maybe ordinary people, but from the top, it feels like a shell game, right? Like this is, this really is all just a way to. to get people to sign on to the upwards redistribution of their tax dollars so that, frankly, Donald Trump and his kids can pay a little less to Uncle Sam in as much that they pay anything to Uncle Sam to begin with. Okay, so let's flip that. So 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. You know, 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 just larger cultural challenge. Like, declining social trust means a lot of things. But, like, one of the things it 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, you know, 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, right? Like that's, it's hard, it's hard to sell that to people because you don't have a captive audience, right? Like, you make this pitch and then you, have the other side saying, well, this is all going to waste for it in the beauty, it's going to lazy people, it's going to layabouts, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think part of the challenge for, not just like Democrats, but just like American liberalism is how do you rebuild a higher trust society, one where people can buy in to like 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, right? Like, 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 source of the New Deal. It's 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 I think that's the big challenge. It's like there's a, broad cultural push towards a kind of very self-focused anti-community kind of way of being. I'm on TikTok too much. And it's like hustle culture is a big thing. And, you know, getting rich off of crypto, which are things that are ultimately like very inwardly focused, sort of like you don't, you're not going to get ahead by collaboration

and community with other people. You're going to get ahead by essentially 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 that's just those that are not, those are not attitudes conducive to kind of pro-social policy of any kind. You know, one area I think the Democrats, look, we have a highly tribalistic politics right now. We have parties that are very good at sort of, well, maybe very good is overstatement.

They're not very good at much of anything. But to the extent they have competence, they have a core competence in sort of delivering to their core constituencies, some of the goodies that the core constituencies 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. And so, you know, Democrats have long won more female voters than male voters. over time, a perception takes hold that the Democratic Party likes women, it's women voters, and doubles down on taking care of women and sort of neglects or leaves men behind. And I've been in rooms where I will talk about the plight of young boys in this country. And I'm not talking about the boys who are wealthy and elite.

We all know that, you know, 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, ADHD, etc. And I have been in left-leaning spaces where just this look of skepticism cubs over your face. Like, this is a patriarchal society. Boys are on top in the society.

What are you talking about? And there has been, 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 of the reasons why 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 reevaluate their approach. But it shouldn't have to take that. So I have seen it on in these left-leaning spaces, and much the same way I see in a lot of right-leaning spaces, just 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 hardcore fundamentalist evangelical spaces and 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 sort of government and leadership, And so you see that pro-male perspective of the GOP morphing into anti-female. And I have seen the pro-female move on the left, morphing into anti-male.

Let me just take one step back. And so 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, 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? There's at least a space for the return of compassion, or have we gone beyond that? and we'll have to actively work to call it back. I don't think we'll see it. Because let me put it this way, Michelle. The people who are driving this attack on empathy are not suffering people.

Okay, 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 in 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. Jamel, you got any thoughts on bringing compassion back? I tend to see things as quite cyclical. So I think, I don't know what will bring it back. But in the same way that American culture does contain sort of antecedents and strains that are producing this sort of 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 not, it's obviously not going to be an automatic thing. It's going to be like political work done to reinforce them back into our mainstream political culture. And it might just have to happen once Trump fades from the scene. And also it could happen through...

And the Democrats stop being weenies? Yes. 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. I don't want to put that kind of pressure on the Pope. That's a lot of pressure to put on the Pope. He's the Pope. He can handle it.

So with that, I want to thank you guys again. This has been great fun, and I want to do it again soon. But farewell for now. Thanks so. much, Michelle and Jamel. It was great chat with y'all. Yeah, this was a real pleasure. Great to see you both. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Veshaqa Darba, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger.

It's edited by Kari Pitkin and Alison Bruzick. Engineering, Mixing, and Original Music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuelski. The director of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.