By Christine Rosen
Sunday, March 01, 2026
In a recent issue of the Nation, essayist Anna
Krauthamer told a harrowing story: “I was raped by a group of men during a
three-day trip I took to Las Vegas with two of my best friends,” she wrote of
an incident that took place four years earlier. “Of the rape, which lasted all
night, I remember both too much and too little. I never did anything about it.”
Rape is a horrific crime that too often goes unreported;
victims can experience feelings of shame and fear, and many blame themselves,
especially if the rapist was someone they knew. But Krauthamer had other
motivations for not pressing charges. “The simple answer to the question of why
I never reported the rape is that I believe in the abolition of police and
prisons,” she wrote, adding that “to pursue prosecuting and potentially
incarcerating other people is inconceivable to me.”
What is also evidently “inconceivable” to her is the
logical consequences of a world where everyone acts like Krauthamer, refusing
to report crime because they feel bad for the perpetrators. Krauthamer’s
solipsism and self-regard are on full display when she admits, “I don’t want to
ruin the lives of my rapists and I don’t know if they have children. The only
thing I want is for them to never have done what they did to me—and nothing,
including sending them to prison, will ever change that reality.” Nowhere does
she acknowledge that by refusing to report her own rape, she guarantees that her
rapists remain free to attack other women. If her prison-abolition fantasies
were ever realized, she would also take away from others the right to pursue
justice for the crimes committed against them.
Not surprisingly, the response to the piece was
overwhelmingly negative. Many people questioned its veracity and noted that
Krauthamer wrongly claimed she could not press charges now because the statute
of limitations had passed; in Nevada, the statute of limitations for rape is 20
years, something that basic fact-checking by editors at the Nation would
have revealed. Other observers wondered whether the essay was perhaps a bit of
fabulism in service to career goals, given that Krauthamer is pursuing a Ph.D.
in literature at Columbia University and her research “addresses sexual
violence and contemporary narrative.”
This was not the first essay on rape that Krauthamer has
authored; in the Baffler, she criticized Hillary Clinton for noting that
rape and gender-based assault have been used as weapons of war in conflict
zones such as Ukraine and in Israel during the October 7 attacks. Krauthamer’s
criticism wasn’t that Clinton was wrong (Krauthamer herself goes on at length
defending Hamas by claiming falsely that its people never raped Israeli women).
It was that Clinton didn’t admit that her real aim in drawing attention to
gender-based violence around the world was to encourage Western imperialism.
But the most frequently invoked criticism of Krauthamer’s
story was that it was an example of “suicidal empathy”—that is, a maladaptive
and harmful form of the ability to understand and share the feelings of others.
Empathy has been enjoying a cultural moment. You can buy sweatshirts with
“EMPATHY” emblazoned on them and bumper stickers that say “Practice Radical
Empathy.” Bookstore self-help aisles are filled with titles such as Sensitive
Is the New Strong and children’s books that purport to teach
empathy-building skills. We are told to read more literature because it will
make us more empathetic (an update of an older notion of literature’s ability
to cultivate the sympathetic imagination), and even technologists are claiming
they can build “empathetic AI.”
And yet, as a society, we are evidently failing to be
sufficiently empathetic. President Bill Clinton once told the public, “I feel
your pain,” but former Democratic leaders can’t seem to stop scolding
Americans—particularly those who aren’t supporters of the Democratic
Party—about their lack of empathy. Barack Obama has complained about the
“empathy deficit” among Americans, and in a recent issue of the Atlantic,
Hillary Clinton used the recent killing of Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti as
a jumping-off point for condemning “MAGA’s war on empathy.” Invoking Jesus’s
guidance to love thy neighbor and help others, Clinton notes that Jesus said,
“Do this and you shall live.” “Not in Donald Trump’s America,” she writes.
On the right, a debate has been raging about the dangers
of too much, rather than too little, empathy. Last year, during an appearance
on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk said, “We’ve got civilizational suicidal
empathy going on…and it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should
care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a
whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.” He noted open-border
policies and unrestricted immigration as evidence of the practice. Likewise,
Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey’s book decrying the effects of “toxic
empathy” has generated significant controversy among Christians. Canadian
marketing professor Gad Saad’s forthcoming book about suicidal empathy,
subtitled Dying to Be Kind, promises to continue the debate in a secular
context.
But the arguments about too much or too little empathy
overlook the greater danger embedded in the logic of Krauthamer’s argument: the
radical ideological motivation behind such seemingly irrational decisions.
Krauthamer and her ilk are not expressing an extreme form of empathy. They are
weaponizing pity. A genuinely empathetic person would understand the risk of
not reporting her rape because of the potential harm to other women. And in
doing so, she would recognize that the incarceration of criminals is both
punitive and protective of society.
A revolutionary, by contrast, weaponizes pity in service
of radical ideological goals such as prison abolition. In On Revolution,
Hannah Arendt outlined the result. As it did for Robespierre during the French
Revolution, pity becomes a tool for abstractions about the “sufferings of
mankind,” as opposed to compassion (what we now call empathy), which is
supposed to be singular and focused on another person. Once this abstraction of
“suffering people” is invoked, it encourages the use of any means to end it.
“Politically speaking, one may say that the evil of Robespierre’s virtue was
that it did not accept any limitations,” Arendt wrote. His “pity-inspired
virtue, from the beginning of his rule, played havoc with justice and made
light of laws.”
Such notions have not disappeared. “Since the days of the
French Revolution, it has been the boundlessness of their sentiments that made
revolutionaries so curiously insensitive to reality in general and of persons
in particular, whom they feel no compunctions in sacrificing to their
‘principles,’ or to the course of history, or to the cause of revolution as
such,” Arendt noted.
Labeling revolutionary behavior an extreme form of
empathy risks overlooking both the appeal of, and the greater harm caused by,
the ideological mission. These are radicals—knock-off Robespierres—whose
abstract notion of the good is unconnected to the real-world experiences and
needs of actual human beings. (It is not a surprise that Krauthamer cites as
one of her intellectual heroes a supporter of political violence: the Soviet
apologist, card-carrying Communist, and Black Panther supporter Angela Davis.)
The motivating force of people like Krauthamer is
ideological victory in the battles they have chosen (in her case, the abolition
of prisons). Her claim to victimhood allows her moral grandstanding to carry
greater weight and visibility, even as it turns into distant abstractions the
individual women who are at real risk of being assaulted by the men she refuses
to report. The danger isn’t empathy; it’s the way such abstraction can lead to
dehumanization.
This form of radical pity in service to ideology might
explain why, in recent months, many nurses—practitioners of a “caring”
profession—have been fired and lost their licenses for posting on social media
their intention to harm people with whom they disagree. One nurse stated her
intention to refuse to provide anesthesia to supporters of Donald Trump; a
labor and delivery nurse wished of Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who
is expected to give birth in May, “I hope that you f—ing rip from bow to stern
and never sh— normally again, you c—.” Yet another nurse encouraged people to
drug ICE agents. Their duty to individual patients was sacrificed to the
radical pity they feel for the people targeted by the Trump administration. In
the face of such cruelty, they argue, anything goes.
Is there a solution to our “empathy” problem? After
cataloging the many vices of the anti-empathy MAGA universe, Hillary Clinton
claims, “If we give up on empathy, we give up on any real chance of coming
together to solve our problems. Empathy…opens our eyes to moral complexity.
It’s not a sign of weakness; it’s a source of strength.”
This is wrong. As Paul Bloom argued a decade ago in Against
Empathy, empathy is “a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and
often motivates indifference and cruelty. It can lead to irrational and unfair
political decisions.” He makes a much more persuasive case for rational
compassion as a guide to resolving conflict. I would add respect for the rule
of law and rejection of political violence. Whether or not we heed this advice,
it’s useful to have case studies like Anna Krauthamer, someone whose own sense
of right and wrong has become so deformed by ideological devotion to extremist
ideas that she found herself performatively pitying her rapists while insisting
they shouldn’t be prevented from raping again.
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