In 2022, Charlie Kirk, the late conservative political activist and the co-founder of Turning Point USA, made these remarks about sympathy and empathy. “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term, and it does a lot of damage,” Kirk said. He said that the word ’empathy’ works well in politics though.“When Bill Clinton said, ‘I feel your pain,’ that was a brilliant political move. It was total nonsense, but it worked. I prefer sympathy. Sympathy is a much better word. Sympathy is saying, ‘I’m sorry for what you’re going through, I’m going to try to help you.’ Empathy is like, ‘I’m going to become you, I’m going to feel exactly what you’re feeling.’ It’s impossible, it’s narcissistic, and it’s destructive.”
Empathy versus sympathy
Etymologically, empathy is a relatively modern concept, entering the English language in the early 20th century as a translation of the German psychological term Einfühlung (“feeling into”). Kirk argued that it was not possible to literally absorb and replicate another person’s pain within oneself. He argued that this was a “new-age” delusion. It was impossible to truly feel another person’s unique suffering, and pretending to do so often shifted the focus onto the observer’s own emotional state, rendering it inherently self-centered.Sympathy is not imbibing the same pain of one person but feeling sorry for one’s suffering. Kirk said it maintained a healthy, honest boundary. Sympathy acknowledges another person’s suffering from a distance. It says, “I see that you are hurting, I am genuinely sorry for your plight, and I wish for your circumstances to improve.” It does not pretend to inhabit the other person’s consciousness.Citing the example of Bill Clinton, what Charlie Kirk hammered home was that the left-leaning political establishment weaponized empathy to create an impenetrable moral high ground.In modern debates, whether the topic is border security, welfare expansion, student loan forgiveness, or healthcare, the arguments are frequently framed around emotional narratives of victimhood and suffering. When a political movement frames its platform entirely around empathy, it shifts the debate from the realm of efficacy to the realm of morality.Kirk argued that this was a rhetorical trick. Empathy instead of sympathy completely shifted the conversation and instead of debating whether a policy actually worked, the debate became about who was a good person and who was a monster.