‘Toxic Empathy’ Is Just Tribalism

By Dan McLaughlin

Friday, April 17, 2026

 

One of the buzzwords of the political moment is “toxic empathy.” It’s not a new concept, but the term has been popularized of late by Allie Beth Stuckey in a 2024 book, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. As Stuckey explained to Ross Douthat some months back:

 

Putting yourself in someone’s shoes, feeling what they feel can also lead you to do three things that I say makes empathy toxic: One, validate lies. Two, affirm sin. And three, support destructive policies. . . .

 

Allowing feeling how they feel to lead you to justify what they are doing — which happens in abortion and the gender debate and the sexuality debate and the justice debate and the immigration debate.

 

Because we feel so deeply for this one purported victim, we say, well, maybe deportation is wrong, or maybe I should affirm this person’s stated gender, even though it mismatches their biology, or maybe I should affirm the right to have an abortion because I feel so deeply for this person’s plight. That is when your empathy has led you in a bad direction and has turned toxic.

 

As she added in a debate with David French, “My definition of toxic empathy is that empathy that causes you to ignore the person on the other side of the moral equation.”

 

Much of the blowback against the book has twisted Stuckey’s argument to claim that she is against any sort of empathy. (In this sense, it’s something of a mirror image, perhaps deliberately, of the “toxic masculinity” debate.) But Stuckey doesn’t argue against empathy; she simply contends that it’s a tool rather than a virtue in itself, which can lead us to bad ends as well as virtuous ones. French’s disagreement with her is less with the characterization of one-sided empathy than with his general view that we need more, rather than less, empathy in politics, while Stuckey argues that feelings-based politics tends to be dangerous. As she told Douthat, “There are always going to be people on both sides of any story with real pain, with real stories that matter. And both people are made in the image of God. At the end of the day, that’s why you can’t be led by empathy, because if you allow yourself, you can feel really deep empathy for people with competing needs and interests.”

 

It’s interesting to consider why that is, and how empathy — and its close cousin compassion, for that matter — can become a tool for wrongdoing. Because it turns out that what may begin as empathy ends up just functioning like tribalism.

 

Tribalism is an essential human instinct, impossible to eradicate: Our need to form families, communities, and other groups and give more of ourselves to them than to outsiders is wired deeply into us. Some evolutionary biologists believe that it is what allowed homo sapiens to win the competition for survival and mastery with the Neanderthals, who may have been both smarter and stronger but not as good at cooperation, collective self-defense — and, yes, collective aggression.

 

But tribalism’s bad name in modern politics comes from the dark side inherent in forming in-groups and preferring their members to those of the out-groups. That way can lie comparatively harmless forms of tribalism like deep loyalty to sports teams and favorite bands, but also bigotry and excesses of nationalism and partisanship.

 

The mental process of tribalism is its gravitational pull to rationalize every collision of interests or pride between the tribe and the Other: We are drawn to justify whatever the tribe does and demonize anybody who stands in the way. The feeling of an emotional bond with our own side can override facts, logic, and evidence pointing in the other direction.

 

This is exactly the process that Stuckey and other critics of toxic empathy describe. The gateway is to be asked to sympathize, then empathize, with one particular group — women who want abortions, or illegal immigrants, or gender transitioners. The dynamic is most glaring in international conflicts, especially in the case of the Palestinian cause. Once the person who is empathizing — what Douthat refers to as “misplaced mothering” and Tom Wolfe skewered half a century ago as “radical chic” — has grown to identify with that group, they will begin to act in classic tribalist fashion, excluding from view all competing interests and developing apologetics or simple denial even for atrocities committed for the cause. The only thing that distinguishes this from ordinary tribalism is that the person who gets drawn into toxic empathy has identified by proxy with a group of which they are not a member. But then, that’s how fans of sports teams are, too.

 

As Stuckey told Douthat, “Especially with kids in the classroom, the more you emphasize empathy, the meaner those kids can get to those in the out-group. Abigail Shrier phrased it like this: full of empathy and mean as hell.” How can that be? Partly because it’s even harder to see your own hostility when you have convinced yourself that it’s all just compassion. But more fundamentally, because identifying with the feelings of other people can also ultimately mean identifying not only with their lies and sins but with their resentments and hatreds. A good writer on the Civil War needs some empathy with the Confederates in order to accurately describe their story, but if you empathize entirely with Nathan Bedford Forrest, you end up in a white sheet.

 

A realistic politics neither will nor can ever do away with empathy or emotion, any more than it can do away with tribalism itself. But in all cases, it’s important to periodically step outside your emotional reactions and ask if you are actually doing good, rather than just feeling good.