Is empathy saving America — or tearing it apart? – Los Angeles Times

Is empathy saving America — or tearing it apart?

By Anita Chabria, Columnist Follow, Dec. 27, 2025 3 AM PT, Click here to listen to this article. Editor’s Note: Audio in online version.

• Some on the right have gone so far as to declare empathy a sin.
• Most Americans do not agree with the notion that empathy is bad. In fact, we see it as a benefit to society.

Growing up, my house backed up to a park with a teeter-totter, the kind that was little more than a steel pipe with two wooden boards as seats. Yeah, I’m that old.

When I was little, the up and down was hours of fun. But bouncing from sky to dirt in a bipolar fashion loses its charms with endless repetition. As we grew older, my friends and I would try to balance instead, making the bar hover horizontally off the ground through a mix of physics and what seemed like magic.

That, folks, is my metaphor for life, America and this particular column. America needs balance, no matter how difficult it is to achieve, no matter if we topple a few times trying. And no, I don’t mean finding a moderate political middle ground — there’s no middle ground with hate.

We need to be both empathetic toward our fellow Americans while at the same time having clarity about the seriousness of our political moment — what is possible and what is not, what is practical and what being a decent human requires of us.

Empathy and clarity. Not one or the other, but both, in equal measure.

Let me explain why I am making this obvious point.

There is a new attack underway by the far right that some of you may yet be unaware of. Those who seemingly disdain values I hold dear — solidarity, compassion, freedom — have launched a war on empathy.

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Yes, empathy, the ability to share and understand the feelings of another — the gateway drug to emotions including mercy, and values including tolerance and justice. Some on the right have gone so far as to declare empathy a sin.

That may sound like a bad Christmas joke, but it’s true. This tantrum against our ability, maybe even obligation, to recognize others’ experiences is a strange and sad offshoot of the successful assault on “woke,” which has always been little more than belligerence toward equality.

This denigration of empathy is steadily if stealthily gaining a following on the so-called Christian right. More disturbingly, it can be seen in federal policy, which increasingly doesn’t just allow cruelty, but favors it. To wit: Stephen Miller.

MAGA champion Elon Musk put this view most succinctly when he labeled empathy as dangerous to America, and “Western” civilization as a whole.

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Musk said earlier this year on the Joe Rogan podcast. “The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through.”

The premise here isn’t that all empathy is wrong, only empathy for those deemed unworthy. I’ll let you make your own list of who Musk and other followers of this mean little philosophy consider undeserving.

There’s an ugly logic to this position, though — which is what makes it dangerous. Empathy tells us to help everyone all the time, to open our hearts, our borders and maybe even our federal coffers.

Clarity tells us it’s simply not possible to help everyone, and trying to do so will topple the whole shebang. Musk is right that choices about who to help and how to help are necessary.

But his pitting of empathy in direct opposition to that clarity about our limitations is self-serving and, let’s be real, the kind of man-child narcissism currently being celebrated as strength. But we are not required to shrink into selfishness and judgment when faced with need. There is actually a Good Book that discusses this. And as individuals and a country, we have always made hard choices, sometimes fair ones, often not.

Regardless, this current attempt by the anti-empathy crowd to create a separation of humanity into valuable vs. exploitative is a guiding star for President Trump’s policies.

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