鬼百合
One day we will wake to his obituary :-)
Conservatism: America’s Empathy Disorder
A corrections officer turned researcher discovers that the psychological traits defining prison life, callousness, dominance, and empathy deficits, have escaped the cellblocks and now shape our politics
Rupert Murdoch eating brunch. Aug, 19 2026
Every morning at the prison where I worked, I’d pass through the same ritual. Badge in. Keys collected. Radio check. Then the walk through the sally port into a world where empathy was a liability and cruelty a currency. What I didn’t expect was how much that world would teach me about the one outside the wire, about the officers who guarded, the politicians who governed, and the invisible psychological threads connecting them all.
The dayroom was where you could see it most clearly. Inmates would cluster around the television, not for sports or soap operas, but for politics. These men, part of a population where researchers have found roughly 65% meet criteria for antisocial personality disorder and 80% have at least one personality disorder according to a comprehensive Lancet review by Fazel and Danesh (2002), would watch Fox News with religious devotion, cheering for Trump like he was their personal champion. “He tells it like it is,” they’d say. “He’s a fighter, like us.”
These men, who’d violated the most fundamental boundaries of human empathy, appeared to find something familiar in a politician who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” who had been found liable for sexual abuse in the E. Jean Carroll case, who treated women’s bodies as territory to be conquered. They’d gather closest to the TV when he spoke, nodding along when he denied accusations, claimed victimhood, attacked his accusers. It was a pattern I couldn’t unsee: men convicted of predatory crimes identifying with rhetoric that mirrored their own rationalizations.
At first, I dismissed it as irony. Then I started paying attention to the officers’ break room.
The conversations were often eerily similar. My fellow Officers, who were almost universally conservatives, would spend time every day talking about their love of Donald Trump and would rail against “socialist” policies while collecting union-negotiated salaries that dwarfed what their counterparts made in “free-market” red states. In Washington, correctional officers average around $45 an hour according to state data, while in states like Texas or Florida, the low-tax havens they praised, the same job pays roughly half that.
Many officers I worked with seemed to have troubled family lives, a pattern that aligns with research showing law enforcement faces domestic violence rates as high as 40% in some studies (Neidig et al., 1992), compared to 10% in the general population. One colleague, going through his third divorce, once told me that “kindness gets you killed in here,” meaning the prison. But I knew he lived by that rule everywhere, at home, at the ballot box, in every human interaction reduced to a zero-sum game of dominance and submission.
I began to see a pattern that my psychology training wouldn’t let me ignore: the same personality traits that concentrated behind bars, what psychologists call the “dark triad” of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, were appearing throughout our political system. The empathy deficits that defined prison life weren’t confined to cellblocks. They were running for office, hosting talk shows, and writing legislation.
This wasn’t just my observation. Hard neuroscience backs it up. When researchers at Tel Aviv University (Zebarjadi et al., 2023) put conservatives and liberals in magnetoencephalography scanners while asking them to imagine others’ suffering, they found something striking: conservative brains literally showed less activation in empathy-related regions like the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex. The difference was visible on the scans, liberal brains showing significantly stronger neural responses to others’ pain, while conservative brains remained comparatively muted.
The effect intensified with political extremity. The study of 55 participants found that the more someone endorsed right-wing authoritarian values, the weaker their neural empathy response. The researchers noted it was as if the conservative brain’s empathy circuits were “dialed down”, not broken, but muted by default.
This finding aligns with earlier work by Darren Schreiber and colleagues (2013), who scanned Democrats and Republicans during a risk-taking task. They found Democrats showing heightened activity in the left insula (associated with social emotions and empathy), while Republicans lit up in the right amygdala, the brain’s fear and threat-detection center. The researchers observed that brain activity alone could predict party affiliation with 82.9% accuracy, suggesting these neural differences are fundamental to political identity.
The personality psychology tells the same story. A comprehensive review by Stephen Morris (2020) in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology found that empathy has become “a hallmark of the political left,” with trait empathy scores consistently predicting liberal attitudes across dozens of studies. The Pew Research Center’s 2014 data is particularly telling: 86% of consistently liberal parents say teaching empathy is “especially important” for children, compared to just 55% of consistently conservative parents, a 31-point gap in valuing compassion itself.
But here’s where it gets interesting, and where my experience in corrections becomes relevant. The same psychological profile that defines criminality also appears, in attenuated form, throughout conservative institutions. Psychologist Robert Hare, who developed the Psychopathy Checklist, found in his book “Snakes in Suits” (2006) that about 4% of senior corporate executives meet clinical criteria for psychopathy, four times the rate in the general population. In prisons, estimates range from 15–25% according to Hare’s research. As executive recruiter Paul Babiak noted in collaboration with Hare, if you work as a prison warden and later attend a CEO gala, you’re encountering similar percentages of psychopaths, “just one’s in jail and one’s not.”
Now, before this becomes a simplistic “conservatives bad, liberals good” narrative, let me complicate the picture. Research by Costello et al. (2022) found that left-wing authoritarianism, while less common than right-wing authoritarianism in the U.S., shows similar patterns of aggression and punitive attitudes toward perceived enemies. The far left has its own capacity for cruelty and dehumanization.
But there’s a crucial difference. Even the most militant leftists, whether anti-fascist activists who assault opponents or environmental radicals who spike trees, are typically fighting for others: strangers they’ll never meet, future generations, non-human animals. Their empathy might be misdirected or expressed through violence, but it exists. They can engage in what psychologists call cognitive empathy, understanding and caring about others’ experiences even when not feeling them directly.
The right-wing extremists I encountered in corrections were different. Their circle of concern was tight: family, race, nation. Outside that circle, empathy simply didn’t register.
The right-wing extremists were different. Their circle of concern was tight, family, race, nation, political party. Outside that circle, empathy simply didn’t register. Research by Waytz and colleagues (2016) confirms this pattern: conservatives don’t necessarily lack empathy entirely, but they restrict it to their in-group, while liberals extend empathy more universally. When a Proud Boy type told me he’d die for his “brothers,” I believed him. When he called immigrants “invading vermin,” I believed that too.
