Conservatism: America’s Empathy Disorder

Author’s Note: This article is being republished in light of November 2025 revelations showing Jeffrey Epstein explicitly stated in private emails that Donald Trump “knew about the girls” and that an alleged victim “spent hours at my house with him.” Conservative media delayed coverage by hours, Trump called it “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” and his approval among Republicans sits at around 45% on this single issue. When confronted with documentary evidence from Epstein himself about their candidate’s awareness of sex crimes against minors, Trump supporters demonstrated the same psychological patterns I observed daily in corrections: the capacity to compartmentalize, rationalize, and maintain loyalty to an in-group leader regardless of the evidence. The parallels between the inmates who saw themselves in Trump and the broader movement that refuses to acknowledge what court documents now prove deserve renewed examination.

This updated essay also reflects my collaboration with Dr. D. Carl Brown on our book Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder, available by clicking on this text.

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 as much of a currency as ramen. 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 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. “No bullshit from him,” the inmates would say. “He’s gonna take care of everything.”

In my observation, the sex offenders seemed to express the most frequent adoration and fealty for Trump.

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. The men convicted of predatory crimes identified with rhetoric that mirrored their own rationalizations.

Then I started paying attention to my fellow officers’ conversations. The subjects of discussion were often eerily similar.

The other officers, almost universally conservatives, would spend time every day talking about their love of Donald Trump, hatred of trans people, and railing against “socialist” policies. All while collecting union-negotiated state employee salaries in a blue state. Our compensation packages dwarfed what our counterparts made in corrupt 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 (Johnson, 1991), 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.

Hard neuroscience backs this up. When researchers at Aalto University in Finland (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, specifically the temporal-parietal junction. 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 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.

Research by Costello et al. (2022) found left-wing authoritarianism exists, but even militant leftists typically fight for strangers they’ll never meet, while right-wing extremists I encountered kept their circle tight: family, race, nation.

When a retired cop, now on his second career as a corrections officer, told me he “would go to D.C. and die for Trump,” I had to believe him.

States with abortion bans have maternal mortality rates 62% higher than states protecting reproductive rights. Women are dying from policies enacted by legislators who lack empathy for strangers.

The same deficit explains welfare attitudes. When Feldman and Huddy (2020) had people imagine themselves in poverty, many participants increased support for social programs. But self-identified “strong conservatives” actively suppressed their empathic response and pushed harder against welfare. They could feel for a church’s soup kitchen recipient but shut down emotionally for the same person on food stamps.

What troubles me most, looking back, is how these traits spread. In prison, new officers would often arrive with normal empathy levels. Within months, they’d adopt the callousness that seemed necessary to survive. In all fairness, the inmates were mostly serial murderers and rapists, hundreds of psychopaths locked into a room with three guards. Empathy would give them something to sink their claws into and manipulation of officers was unfortunately commonplace.

Part of why I left was I saw my own personality shifting in ways I didn’t like. I recognized that being around inmates who were incredibly skilled manipulators and liars required I adopt a deeply paranoid framing and assume the worst in people. This didn’t just shut off when I’d go home after shift.

I see the same selection pressure in politics. The conservative media ecosystem rewards cruelty. Social media algorithms amplify out-group hostile content while right-wing audiences form intense parasocial bonds with hosts who model callousness. When Tucker Carlson, who once mocked dying AIDS patients, becomes a trusted “friend” to millions, his cruelty becomes contagious.

The prison mirror reflects perfectly here: just as inmates must perform toughness to maintain status, conservative politicians must perform cruelty. Expressing empathy for the wrong group, immigrants, trans kids, the poor, marks you as weak, a “RINO” who’ll get primaried. The 2013 House vote on SNAP cuts exemplified this: 217 Republicans voted to slash food stamps by $40 billion, with not a single Democrat supporting it. The incentive structure selects for empathy deficits.

I left law enforcement eventually, but the lessons stayed with me. That prison dayroom where inmates fawned over Trump while officers in the break room did the same wasn’t an anomaly. It was America in microcosm.

The murderers and sex offenders in that dayroom knew exactly what Trump was because they saw themselves. They saw their behavior mirrored and even applauded. When he played victim after being found liable for sexual abuse, they recognized the playbook. They didn’t love him despite being a predator. They loved him because of it.

The same psychological traits that put some men behind bars put others in boardrooms and state houses. The difference wasn’t virtue but circumstance: class, race, the luck of when and where their dark triad traits manifested.

American conservatism has become an ideology that systematically suppresses empathy. It rewards the prison mentality: dominate or be dominated, trust only your tribe, see kindness as weakness. It’s created a political movement that mirrors the psychological dynamics of incarceration, complete with gang colors in the form of red hats and protection rackets in the form of vote-for-us-or-the-criminals-will-get-you rhetoric.

But empathy can only be rebuilt if people want to rebuild it. At the moment, we have a media ecosystem that feeds their disorder, a political system that rewards their cruelty, an economy that promotes their psychopathy. Working as a corrections officer didn’t just teach me harsh truths about human nature. It taught me that we’ve structured society to mass-produce them.

Of course, the main lesson I learned was that convicted sex offenders love Donald Trump.

This updated essay also reflects my collaboration with Dr. D. Carl Brown on our book Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder, available by clicking on this text.

For readers interested in how oligarchic power structures work in practice, I highly recommend W. Lawrence’s Glass Empires on Substack.

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