The Empathy Divide
In recent years, American politics has taken on the texture of a clinical argument. The metaphors are no longer merely ideological—left versus right, liberty versus equality—but diagnostic. We speak of pathologies, disorders, deficits. One of the most provocative of these frames appears in Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder, a book whose title courts outrage even as it insists it is doing something more austere: following the evidence.
At first glance, the claim sounds like partisan psychologizing dressed up as science. But when stripped of rhetoric, the book rests on a quieter, more unsettling proposition—one increasingly supported by peer-reviewed research across psychology, neuroscience, and political science. The deepest fault line in American politics may not be policy or class or geography, but empathy itself: who feels it, toward whom, and under what conditions.
The question is not whether conservatives are capable of empathy. They are. The question is how empathy is distributed, constrained, and overridden—and what happens to a democracy when large segments of the population experience moral concern primarily within tight tribal boundaries.
The Brain’s Moral Geography
Empathy is not an abstraction. It has a neural signature. When people witness another person in pain, a network of brain regions reliably activates, including the anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ), an area crucial for perspective-taking—what psychologists call cognitive empathy.
A growing body of neuroimaging research suggests that political ideology correlates with how strongly these regions respond. In one magnetoencephalography (MEG) study published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, participants watched others suffer while researchers measured millisecond-by-millisecond brain activity. Those with liberal political orientations showed significantly stronger activation in the TPJ than their conservative counterparts, indicating a more robust neural response associated with imagining another person’s inner experience.
Other studies converge on a complementary pattern. During tasks involving risk, threat, or social judgment, conservatives tend to show greater activation in the amygdala—the brain’s fear and threat-detection hub—while liberals show more activity in the left insula, a region associated with emotional awareness and social feeling. The contrast is not about intelligence or moral worth; it is about which signals dominate when values collide. Fear versus care. Threat versus suffering.
These are population-level findings, not destiny. But they matter because politics is, at scale, a system of aggregated instincts.
Hierarchy, Callousness, and the Psychology of Power
The neurological story aligns with decades of work in personality psychology, particularly research on Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)—a trait describing how comfortable someone is with hierarchy and inequality. High-SDO individuals tend to view the world as a competitive arena where some groups are naturally entitled to more than others.
Across cultures and methodologies, high SDO consistently correlates with lower empathy, reduced altruism, and greater tolerance for suffering—especially when that suffering falls on out-groups. In experimental settings, people high in SDO are less disturbed by images of harm inflicted on marginalized populations and more likely to endorse punitive or exclusionary policies.
Recent political data sharpen the picture. A 2025 study summarized by PsyPost found that favorable views of Donald Trump were associated with higher scores on measures of psychopathy, manipulativeness, narcissism, and callousness, alongside significantly lower levels of affective empathy. The study did not claim that Trump supporters are mentally ill. It demonstrated that certain personality traits—low concern for others’ pain, high tolerance for dominance—predict attraction to authoritarian leadership styles.
That attraction is not mysterious. Authoritarian figures promise order, hierarchy, and moral clarity in a world perceived as threatening. Empathy, by contrast, complicates judgment. It demands attention to nuance, context, and shared vulnerability. For people oriented toward dominance, empathy can feel less like a virtue than a liability.
Moral Foundations and the Narrowing of Concern
Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory helps explain why this divide feels less like disagreement and more like incomprehension. Liberals and conservatives draw from different moral palettes.
Liberals prioritize the Care/Harm foundation—sensitivity to suffering—above almost all else. Conservatives value Care too, but place it alongside “binding” foundations: Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. These values stabilize groups, preserve traditions, and enforce norms, but they also condition empathy. Care is extended generously within the group, cautiously—or not at all—beyond it.
The result is not an absence of empathy but a narrower moral circle. Police officers, soldiers, family members, fellow citizens may evoke deep compassion; immigrants, prisoners, political opponents often do not. When harm befalls outsiders, it is more easily reframed as deserved, inevitable, or morally instructive.
This pattern appears repeatedly in policy research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, political conservatism predicted lower adherence to protective behaviors such as masking and social distancing, a relationship partially mediated by lower dispositional empathy. In immigration debates, lower empathy predicts support for harsher enforcement and reduced concern for humanitarian consequences. In criminal justice, it predicts tolerance for extreme punishment.
Empathy does not dictate policy, but it constrains the range of policies one finds morally imaginable.
When Metaphor Meets Measurement
The phrase “personality disorder,” as used in Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder, is deliberately provocative—and clinically imprecise. Conservatism is not a diagnosis. No psychiatric manual defines an ideology as pathology. But metaphors persist when they illuminate something real.
Clinical psychology offers a relevant parallel. Cluster B personality disorders—antisocial, narcissistic, borderline—share a core feature: impaired empathy. Individuals with these traits can function, succeed, even dominate institutions, but their decision-making systematically discounts others’ inner lives. Harm becomes easier. Justification becomes reflexive.
The book argues that when such traits become culturally rewarded—amplified by media ecosystems, political incentives, and economic hierarchies—they scale. What looks like individual pathology becomes structural behavior. Cruelty is reframed as strength. Indifference as realism.
This argument is not based on intuition alone. It is grounded in peer-reviewed neuroscience, personality research, and political psychology, and synthesized through lived observation by the authors, including correctional and clinical settings . The evidence does not indict every conservative. It indicts a pattern: the systematic de-prioritization of empathy when it conflicts with hierarchy, authority, or identity.
The Two-Way Mirror
There is an uncomfortable symmetry here. Studies also show that liberals often exhibit less empathy toward conservatives than conservatives show toward liberals. Ideological contempt runs both directions. Moral certainty can harden into moral blindness on any side.
But the asymmetry lies in consequences. A deficit of empathy among those advocating expanded rights produces very different outcomes than the same deficit among those wielding state power to punish, exclude, or withdraw support. When empathy narrows among those designing policy, the costs are borne by the vulnerable.
Democracies depend on a shared baseline of concern—an assumption that other people’s suffering matters even when they are strangers, even when they vote differently, even when they are inconvenient. When that baseline erodes, politics becomes a zero-sum contest of dominance. The language of disorder enters not as insult, but as warning.
Empathy, it turns out, is not a soft virtue. It is civic infrastructure. And like any infrastructure, when it decays, the collapse is not metaphorical.
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