John Harris says empathy is becoming a political liability worldwide

Public Religion Research Institute polling finds sharp partisan divide over empathy

Political rhetoric in Britain and the United States, as well as within Trumpism and its adherent movements around the world, has begun treating empathy as a liability rather than a foundational moral value, according to John Harris’s Nov. 3 Guardian opinion commentary. Harris, a Guardian columnist, connects Reform’s Robert Jenrick, Elon Musk and JD Vance to a conservative and MAGA current that casts compassion as weakness, placing the trend in the run-up to the US midterms and Britain’s turn toward what he calls the hard right. He writes that virtues such as compassion and kindness are gathering dust around the world and describes the prospect of a “decisive western moral counter-revolution.”

The commentary was accompanied by a photograph of Elon Musk holding a chainsaw while he spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland on 20 February 2025. The photograph was credited to Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

Harris wrote that the same moral push was supported by what he called alarming numbers of regular people. Polling by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 84% of registered US Democrats support the proposition that empathy helps build a healthy society, while only 54% of Republicans agree. The survey’s accompanying description said: “White evangelical Protestants are the only religious group in which a majority does not agree that empathy is a foundational moral value (42%). Instead, a majority (54%) say empathy can be dangerous.”

Toward the end of summer, the Tory-Reform defector Robert Jenrick wrote a Daily Telegraph op-ed about what Harris described as “the seemingly impossible economics of rising benefits bills because of mental ill-health.” Harris said that, in Jenrick’s capacity as Reform’s Treasury spokesman, Jenrick’s task was to build support for plans to cut 25% of so-called welfare spending by 2030 and address what Jenrick called the state’s “suicidal empathy.”

Harris said he found the phrase in Gad Saad’s Suicidal Empathy, published that year by the Canadian academic, whose book jacket described his expertise in “the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behaviour.” Elon Musk, whom the column calls the world’s richest man, endorsed it: “Western civilisation is doomed unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognised and actions are taken that are hard but necessary for survival,” and, “All of Gad’s books, including this one, are great.”

Harris wrote that “Suicidal Empathy is not great” and called it “a baggy mess.” He rejected its straw men, including the claim that “suicidal empathy can cause people to care more about rapists and other felons than their victims,” and said the book joined those claims to familiar arguments about immigration, Covid lockdowns and whether the word “imbecile” was offensive. He disputed an argument that the West’s supposed embrace of “degenerate woke-ism” was largely traceable to women being “much more likely to succumb to such emotional and ideological capture.” “At a push, its most useful function is as a meandering guide to the soup of ideas simmering in the minds of hardcore Maga voters as they prepared for this week’s midterms,” he wrote.

Beyond Saad, Harris described “a huge amount of this stuff around” as crystallising the philosophical core of Trumpism and its adherent movements across the world, roughly the idea that “might is right and compassion is for wimps.” He wrote that the moment was “well beyond the culture wars” and the US right’s long history of Christian revisionism, which he described as “to put it politely,” and into what he called the serious prospect of a “decisive western moral counter-revolution that may already be under way.” Harris wrote that the possible counter-revolution was certainly the intention of the voices responsible for podcasts, social media posts and other “Maga potboilers.” He cited Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey’s 2024 book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, and right-wing pastor Joe Rigney’s book from the previous year, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits.

Harris then discussed JD Vance, whom he described as a possible Trump successor, a Catholic convert and a figure who had “locked horns with two popes.” In April, Pope Leo XIV criticized US attacks on Iran, saying, “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” Vance replied, “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

A few months earlier, the vice-president had said his “old-school” notion of Christian compassion descended in priority from “your family,” “your neighbor” and “your community” to “your fellow citizens in your own country.” Only then, he said, could people “focus [sic] and prioritize the rest of the world.”

Soon after, in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk called empathy a civilizational weakness. Harris described him as “our era’s most pre-eminent moral philosopher,” then quoted Musk: “The fundamental weakness of western civilisation,” Musk said, “is empathy, the empathy exploit.” Musk said progressives were “exploiting a bug in western civilisation, which is the empathy response.”

After that, Harris returned to the history of compassion, invoking classicist and historian Tom Holland’s bestseller Dominion, which he described as a history of Christianity and its global impact. He said the book illuminates how an emphasis on what is now called empathy was one of religion’s philosophical revolutions. He noted that the word was only created in 1908 as the English translation of the German “Einfühlung,” or “in-feeling.”

Holland described how “Across the Roman world,” “wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight.” Harris said such everyday barbarism was reflected in official attitudes toward poor, disabled and infirm people until the moral change following Rome’s conversion to Christianity under Constantine.

Holland described every week in churches across the Roman world, collections for “orphans and widows, for the imprisoned, and the shipwrecked and the sick,” after which “Entire systems of social security had begun to emerge.” For Holland, “divine love for the outcast and derelict demanded that mortals love them too.”

Harris contrasted that history with what he called the modern US’s moral distance from Christian ideals. He pointed to “ICE detention camps,” what he called Musk’s “vandalism of USAID,” and “the 700,000 deaths it is reckoned to have already caused.” He said no one would claim Christian countries and institutions continued those ideals in subsequent centuries, but contended that the modern US was surely now “moral light years away.”

The British portion of the column was tied to changes associated with Margaret Thatcher. Harris noted that Thatcher, who was raised as a strict Methodist, occasionally voiced remarkable opinions about Christian teaching and questions of morality. In January 1980, she said, “no one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.” Harris argued that Thatcher was “way ahead of her time” and opened the path to the moral positions later advanced by Jenrick, his Reform colleagues and his former Tory colleagues.

In present-day Britain, Harris said some of Jenrick’s new Reform comrades and former Tory colleagues had gone further. Some say, “let migrants drown,” while others accuse the lifeboat service of complicity in a “supposed invasion of untouchables” and mourn the decline of “Judeo-Christian culture.”

Harris concluded that a “proper Republican drubbing” on Tuesday might give the anti-empaths the kind of shock they deserved, but that Musk’s power and influence alone showed it would take more than a single round of election results to push them back. His conclusion was global: “Meanwhile, all over the world, compassion, kindness and other such virtues gather a thick layer of dust, like old hymn books in a long-deserted church.”