The return of cruelty

There's a certain sense of a return to cruelty in the air. I'm not talking about a widespread collective psychological shift, although that could be the long-term consequence, but rather that cruelty is being politically sanctioned. Many common threads can be found among the leaders of the new right, but perhaps one of the most palpable is that they all speak and act in a way that clearly gives us permission to be cruel. Cruel to the losers of capitalism, who deserve it for being lazy, and cruel to other races and cultures, because they have a way of being that is bad and irreconcilable with our own. Now that most political thinkers say we are entering a post-liberal era, it seems pertinent to remember that a preoccupation with cruelty is perhaps the most distinctive feature of liberalism.

Politicizing the concern about cruelty is a result of the cultural shifts of modernity and humanism: from a religious perspective, human nature is irreversibly sinful, and the struggle against our flaws is as necessary as it is impossible to win. Liberalism, on the other hand, the secular offspring of Christianity, shares the idea that we are imperfect but adds the conviction that, if we equip ourselves with the right institutions, we are slowly and gradually perfectible. From Montaigne's essay on cruelty, which pauses to consider the feelings of a deer being hunted, to Richard Rorty's postmodern liberalism, which defines a liberal as "one who thinks that cruelty is the worst thing we human beings can do," the liberal conviction is that there is something in cruelty that leads to a better version of ourselves without the need for divine intervention. Adam Gopnik, one of my favorite writers on the subject, New YorkerHe links it to faith in progressive reform: "The next reform is necessary not because we have changed our views, but because new kinds of cruelty always arise or are seen. Our sight is sharpened. Our circles of compassion are widened. No healthy society ever reaches a safe equilibrium. We always need change. It is not a utopia, but because as the growth of knowledge alters our conditions, we need new understandings to change our plans."

But it turns out that in 2025 one of the new right's favorite phrases has been "suicidal empathy," which Elon Musk regularly invokes in his tweets. The origin of this construct is simply the way mainstream politicians, from the center-right to the center-left, have used the notion of empathy to justify bad policies, especially regarding immigration. For Musk and the Trump administration, who shared AI-generated memes mimicking a comic strip depicting immigrants crying as they were deported—a dehumanizing parody—the mainstream The political landscape of recent years in the West has spent decades justifying suicidal policies in the name of empathy for the disadvantaged, and now we must toughen our character if we want to survive.

As with so many other things, there's a kernel of truth in this right-wing diagnosis that we would do well to try to understand and redirect instead of automatically dismissing it. That said, the great lie is that a history of political errors ends up discrediting one of the fundamental virtues of the liberal heart of our democracies, which, ultimately, is not the cause of our weakness, but rather what makes us stronger than the illiberal alternatives that today raise their hands, demanding their share. Because the beauty of placing compassion at the center instead of cruelty is that you build a society thinking more about the possibility we all have of making mistakes than about the obligation to act in the most perfect and virtuous way possible according to a moral code that is too often redefined on demand. Empathy doesn't mean giving in to bad actions, but rather being able to put yourself in the place of those who, driven by misery or disagreement, have acted illegally, in order to respond proportionally and justly. The great conviction of liberalism is that empathy doesn't replace political strategy, but rather enhances it. The key to liberal democracies is the trust of citizens that their institutions will self-limit in the exercise of power, and a society that tolerates cruelty is weakened precisely because it erodes that trust.

Personally, in recent years I've felt a strong aversion to the empty appeals to empathy made by parties and activists who have used it to justify bad or cynical policies. But I confess that, now that cruelty is becoming normalized, I think it's important to return to our roots. All this to say that I don't expect more emotional pronouncements from the politicians who must combat the rise of authoritarianism and cruelty, but rather that they propose policies different from those they've implemented in recent years and that they are simply capable of explaining them in terms of a humanist discourse and mature values that take into account compassion for the vulnerable. Perhaps it seems like a difference in tone, something merely rhetorical, but I believe that politically it would make a huge difference.