Anglospherics

TO NOT KNOW IS TO HATE?:

The Smugness of Anti-Empathy Politics: Gad Saad spells out his ‘own the libs, scorn the weak’ ethos: a review of Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind by Gad Saad (Cathy Young, May 22, 2026, The Bulwark)

Quillette ran a scathing review by conservative British writer Ben Sixsmith titled “Playing Gad,” critiquing it as simplistic and intellectually self-absorbed. The reviewer in another “heterodox” outlet, Unherd, panned the book for dressing up a catchy concept in a lot of incoherent and “vibes-based” arguments, political vitriol, and lame humor.

The thing is, Saad’s concept—empathy is a good and necessary trait, but can be bad and self-damaging when taken too far—is one few people would dispute. Obvious examples include being trapped in an abusive relationship or a toxic friendship because you’re afraid to hurt the other person by ending it, a concern exploitative people can easily manipulate. On a larger scale, it is self-evidently true that empathy alone is usually not a reliable guide to policy or collective action: refusing, on compassionate grounds, to forcibly hospitalize people experiencing certain acute mental health crises can result in grave harm not only to other people but to the patients themselves.

Indeed, other people have critiqued the overreliance on empathy—at least in the literal “I feel your pain” sense which distinguishes empathy from the related concepts of sympathy and compassion, even if many people use the words interchangeably. Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom wrote a generally well-received book titled Against Empathy in 2016, proposing “Rational Compassion” instead. Bloom argued, among other things, that the emotional component of empathy leads us to focus too much on highly visible cases of suffering (a little child who falls down a well becomes more important than a lot of little children whose lives are quietly wrecked by poverty). Ironically—given that Saad spends a lot of time excoriating liberals for being too afraid to seem racist—Bloom also argued that empathy-based morality can easily become de facto racist and tribalist, since we tend to empathize more with people like ourselves: hence the disproportionate media focus on young white women who go missing.

For Saad, though, “suicidal empathy” is strictly a culture-war concept. In his framework, the term refers to ostensibly compassionate political views he considers misguided: support for migrants and refugees, Muslim immigrants in particular; excessive concern with the rights and well-being of criminals and/or homeless people; high taxes to pay for social programs; defense of transgender identities; an #IBelieveHer stance toward women who accuse men of sexual misconduct. (Unless, of course, the alleged perps are migrants or Muslims or both, in which case insufficient support for the victims is a sign of suicidal empathy for those groups.)

Gaad has just dressed up Identitarianism. By definition empathy is a personal concept, not one you apply to entire groups (whose personal experiences you can not even pretend to know, as advocates of empathy do).

HOW LOSERS “WIN”:

Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R. (Amanda Taub, May 18, 2026, NY Times)

New research, drawing on an extraordinary data set from Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and ’80s, suggests a very different explanation. It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. The people who make those decisions, the research suggests, are neither extremists nor victims. They are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.

“Making a Career in Dictatorship,” a new book by two German political scientists, Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel, reads like what you might get if you crossed Hannah Arendt’s ideas about the “banality of evil” with a business school guide on how to get the most out of low performers.

Their in-depth study of Argentina’s military during that country’s era of coups and forced disappearances found that low performers — whom they refer to as “career-pressured” individuals — filled the ranks of the secret police. That service allowed them to “detour” around the ordinary military hierarchy, the book shows, achieving promotions and career success they could never have managed otherwise.

It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.

THE IRON LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:

Electoral reform won’t save the Republicans or the Democrats (David L. Leal, 05/16/26, The Hill)

Decades of research have found that socioeconomic status, and particularly education, is key to explaining voter turnout. To understand why, consider this formula: Voting likelihood equals benefits minus costs, plus duty. The benefits of voting are small for individuals, but so is the cost. While few have cast the deciding ballot in an election, voting usually requires minimal effort.

However, in “The Turnout Myth,” my Hoover Institution colleague Daron Shaw and his coauthors discuss a large “diploma gap” that has existed for decades. We see turnout differences across education levels, with the most educated about twice as likely to vote, at 80 percent, as the least, at 40 percent.

Scholars explain this in several ways: First, education reinforces the belief that voting is a civic obligation, or duty. Second, education increases knowledge about politics and government. Voting is easier when you’re familiar with the issues and parties. Third, education enhances civic skills such as public speaking, group organizing and managing paperwork that can make political participation easier.

People with more education therefore have lower costs and higher duty, which leads to greater turnout among them. Education is also associated with higher incomes and professional occupations, which allow individuals to better meet any financial or time costs of voting.

So, when voting is made more challenging, the more educated are, on average, more motivated and able to overcome the obstacles than are people with less education.

And in today’s politics, those individuals are increasingly likely to be Democrats.