The MAGA mindset: Dealing with empathy

In the last several weeks several items, e.g., this, discussing or criticizing empathy have popped up. That was unusual. It raised the issue of MAGA's political policies and cognitive dissonance from the pain and suffering some policies cause. Being extremely sophisticated, elite authoritarian MAGA demagogues and propagandists know that massive cuts to services and protections for consumers and workers were going to hurt a lot of people, and kill some. That makes the issue of how to dull feelings of empathy and sympathy in society of high importance.

Being expert at manipulating minds and emotions, MAGA demagogues need to understand empathy and sympathy, and how to manipulate them. To try to avoid TL/DR, this post focuses on empathy.

There are two kinds of empathy. One is primal emotional empathy, a powerful unconscious feeling. The other is conscious cognitive empathy.

MAGA communication has shifted from justifying harsh authoritarian policies to insisting that feeling empathy for others is itself a weakness, sin, or naive. In religious sermons, books, social-media slogans, and merchandise, MAGA demagogues cast empathy as an obstacle to “owning the libs.” Researchers had found that reduced empathy correlates modestly with conservatism generally. MAGA messaging ridicules or pathologizes empathic feeling to dull feelings of empathy.

Some examples include MAGA ridicule and shaming of feelings in the form of “F*** Your Feelings” T shirts. That messaging framed emotion itself as a liability. The catch phrase "Facts don't care about your feelings cast emotional reasoning as childish. That put cold cognition above compassionate judgment. Elon Musk has argued that "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy."

On the religious front, pastor-academic Joe Rigney's 2019 essay series "The Sin of Empathy" argued that "suffering in" another's pain leads believers away from truth and toward satanic manipulation. The implication being that liberals are Satan's minions. A 2024 bestseller  by Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy, warned Christians that progressives "weaponize compassion" on issues like abortion, food stamp cuts and immigration. One recent article comments that Christian nationalists decided empathy is a sin, despite what the Bible says about the virtues of empathy. Now the concept is mainstream. The argument is that genuine love requires resisting empathy. That has generally made empathy a bad word in most evangelical groups.

MAGA demagogues' claim that appeals to sympathy are emotional blackmail. They argue that border enforcement, budget cuts, anti-abortion laws or anti-trans laws only look cruel because liberals exploit empathy. This messaging equates cognitive empathy with gullibility. The implicit argument is that understanding an opponent’s viewpoint is a moral mistake. It's gullibility to be empathetic, so don't be empathetic! 

Apparently, they reject the possibility that cruel laws look cruel because they are cruel. Clever messaging.

Cognitive dissonance management is needed when MAGA policies cause obvious harm, e.g., kicking people off Medicaid or food stamps. Vilifying empathy allows supporters an easy way to preserve their righteous self-image while feeling little to no cognitive dissonance. Some research indicates that pleasure at out-group pain spikes when leaders signal empathy's irrelevance. Yeah, some people are getting crueler. They just have been tricked by MAGA demagoguery into not knowing it.