The anti-empaths

From the Annals of End Stage Reagan Disease.

I have seen some discussion in smart-people circles about whether the present nightmare is an anomalous new thing born of the Trump Cult or just the natural, malignant development of American conservatism. I adhere to the latter school.

About the best argument that MAGA and conservatism (or Republicanism, same diff) are different things is the continued existence of people who say they are conservative but not MAGA. (Most MAGA people say they’re conservative but, as we see every damn day, they lie about everything so who cares.)

There are, however, observably fewer such people as time goes on. And the difference between them and the overt MAGApods, such as it is, seems based on self-image rather than ideology or philosophy. Around the time Biden was pushing the Not All Republicans Are MAGA theme in 2022 — which became, disastrously, part of the 2024 Harris political strategy — NBC did a poll and found “50 percent of Republicans said they supported the party over Trump and 40 percent said they supported Trump over the party.” This was probably similar to the intelligence that convinced Biden and Harris to try and peel off Republican voters.

But those numbers were very different in 2019 and 2020 and, while no one would even bother to ask them that same question now, you can tell by the way Republicans immediately adopt Trump’s POV, no matter how at variance it is with even classic rightwing positions, that the thing that was called conservatism is thoroughly MAGAfied:

You may say this just shows that everybody loves a winner. But you could have said the same thing about the popularity of Dwight Eisenhower. And, if anything, Eisenhower was out of key with what conservatism/Republicanism would become. (Robert Welch thought he was a Communist dupe.) The progress of proto-MAGA was in context patient and persistent.

There’s a lot of popular history that supports the throughline theory of MAGA conservatism. There’s Rick Perlstein’s multivolume examination (Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland, so far) of how what was once considered a lunatic creed became mainstream and then regnant; John Ganz’ When The Clock Broke threads some under-examined populist trends in the 1990s (David Duke, talk radio, Ross Perot, POW/MIA paranoia, the bizarre folk heroism of John Gotti), and fills in some interesting blanks. (Ganz’s book concludes with the architect Philip Johnson — who, unknown to me, had been as a young man a fan of Huey Long, and praised “the Dillinger and Capone gangs” as “the only groups that have got courage” — in conversation with Donald Trump. “‘You’d make a good mafioso,’ Johnson said. ‘One of the greatest,’ Donald replied.”) In their work you can easily see premonitions of MAGA.

I expect they and others will get to the G.W. Bush and Early Blog Era soon enough. But I wanted to mention something from that era that popped into my head when I saw a few items recently about conservative Christians denouncing empathy.

I hate to quote the winsome fraud David French, but facts is facts:

Last year a popular right-wing podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, published a best-selling book called “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.” This month, a right-wing theologian, Joe Rigney, is publishing a book called “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.”

These attacks are rooted in the idea that progressives emotionally manipulate evangelicals into supporting causes they would otherwise reject. For example, if people respond to the foreign aid shutdown and the stop-work orders by talking about how children might suffer or die, then they’re exhibiting toxic empathy.

In true chicken-or-egg fashion, Elon Musk expressed similar thoughts recently on Joe Rogan (“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization”).

To normal people, this must seem insane. Taking as widely sympathetic a view of it as possible, you might read it as a mere tactical approach — that these people know appeals to sentiment are powerful, and believe that, as adherents to a philosophy that purposefully punishes and immiserates large numbers of people, in order to keep their troops onside they have to gird their emotional loins against such appeals, the way a drill sergeant will break his recruits of sentimentality so as to keep them from being lured into an ambush by weeping enemy townspeople.

Except, in the context of democratic politics, that’s still insane. Countering an illegitimate appeal to emotion is one thing — treating empathy itself as a toxin is, well, literally inhuman.

It reminded me of something I observed in 2006-2008, during the collapse of the Bush GOP, when not only the economy and the Iraq War were coming a-cropper, but an explosion of scandals involving Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, David Vitter and other morally compromised Republicans hastened the downfall — and some conservatives argued that hypocrisy, which was the chief complaint about these godly horndogs, did not really exist.

Here’s David Frum (speaking of non-MAGA conservatives!) arguing in defense of Haggard:

On much of the left, the reaction is gleeful delight: See! He is no better than anybody else!

In my mind, however, this story highlights a widespread moral assumption that I have never been able to understand.

Consider the hypothetical case of two men. Both are inclined toward homosexuality. Both from time to time hire the services of male prostitutes. Both have occasionally succumbed to drug abuse.

One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.

The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution.

Which man is leading the more moral life? It seems to me that the answer is the first one. Instead of suggesting that his bad acts overwhelm his good ones, could it not be said that the good influence of his preaching at least mitigates the bad effect of his misconduct? Instead of regarding hypocrisy as the ultimate sin, could it not be regarded as a kind of virtue — or at least as a mitigation of his offense?

No, he wasn’t kidding. Neither were a number of other conservatives who made similar arguments, like the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto (“Hypocrisy does not mean saying one thing and doing the opposite. It means saying something that one does not believe”) and National Review’s Mona Charen (“But what if [Larry Craig’s] not a hypocrite? Suppose, as my admittedly hasty search suggests, he’s been pretty quiet about family values?” Craig was a supporter of an Idaho Defense of Marriage anti-gay bill.)

It was a brief effulgence, a boomlet if you will, but it stuck in my mind because, for one thing, like the current anti-empathy craze it relies on the denial of a universal human trait — literally one of the hallmarks of humanity — because politics demands it. Also, whenever I see conservatives defending an obviously hypocritical candidate — like the Jesus-y abuser Herschel Walker in 2022 — I am reminded of it, and that for them it’s not just a winking bit of campaign persiflage — it’s literally an alternate reality. I think it helps explain much of what is literally perverse about what they’re doing now.