Reading Hillary Clinton’s most recent article, “MAGA’s War on Empathy,” it’s hard not to have at least some sympathy, and perhaps even empathy, for her.

Yes, Clinton was one of the most ruthless political operators of the last century, a woman who would seemingly do almost anything in pursuit of power. She was extremely close to becoming president, the prize she had always wanted, before being thwarted by Donald Trump of all people, a figure she treated as little more than an absurdity during much of her 2015-16 campaign.

It would be easy to dismiss anything Clinton writes as simple, cynical political posturing. And to be sure, there is plenty of politicized misrepresentation of facts in her latest article. And yet her recent piece attacking the Trump GOP for its supposed lack of empathy, using Minneapolis as a backdrop, is revealing, for it lays bare the moral core of today’s Democratic Party.

If her piece were just political and not reflective to some degree of her sincere belief, she could have done it as an X post or a short op-ed—she certainly didn’t need 6,000 words in The Atlantic to make her case. In this respect I differ somewhat from Pastor Joe Rigney, one of the targets of Clinton’s ire, who wrote his own excellent response. Clinton wrote this essay because, to a certain extent, she means it.

Clinton’s concern with empathy goes back many years. During her infamous “basket of deplorables” speech, she described needing to “empathize” with the half of Donald Trump’s supporters who were not racist, sexist, and xenophobic.

After her defeat, she urged in a 2017 Medium essay titled “Radical Empathy” that everyone walk in others’ shoes across racial, economic, and cultural lines. Clinton made clear the stakes: “Empathy should not only be at the center of our individual lives, our families, and our communities; it should be at the center of our public life, our policy, and our politics,” a call she would reiterate in her 2018 address to Yale’s senior class. She has continued to push the concept on X and in books and articles ever since.

But in one of the delicious ironies that’s seemingly omnipresent in modern politics, she misunderstands both the GOP and empathy itself.

Survey after survey consistently shows that it is liberals, not conservatives, who are lacking in empathy. When asked to give their opinions of each other, far more liberals than conservatives claim that the other side is evil rather than simply uninformed or misguided. Liberals indicate in non-partisan surveys that they are far more likely to exclude conservatives from friendships, business relationships, and other affiliations based solely on political differences. Simply put, conservatives are much more able to empathize with liberals than vice versa. Perhaps Clinton and her “pro-empathy” allies are passionate about pushing empathy in the same way a psychopath attempts to feign emotions so he can fit into normal society.

Clinton also fundamentally misunderstands Trump. Time and again, private citizens (not political rivals) who meet Trump one-on-one privately praise his sensitivity. He’s quick to call someone when they are having a problem or spend extra time far beyond what’s scheduled with a crime victim or someone who is ill. When Trump says something in public that appears insensitive, he’s usually doing so for very intentional political reasons. In fact, in political warfare, President Trump uses his high capacity for empathy—and his genuine understanding of his opponents’ psychology—to know exactly what buttons to push to get the best of them.

Immigration is another area where Clinton badly misjudges her political opponents. I will let her in on a secret: most of the people seemingly “delighting” in deporting illegal aliens actually have a lot of empathy for their situation—we just don’t let unbounded empathy turn off our brains. For example, I am as hardcore on immigration as anyone—and have been for decades. I’m for deporting every single person here illegally and dramatically reducing the number of legal immigrants in America as well. Yet I can sympathize with someone who has been in America illegally for years, perhaps decades, or someone who was brought here illegally as a child.

They have relationships and friendships here, and many make positive contributions to their communities and the economy. (Though, overall, the net economic and social impact of illegal immigrants is highly negative.) But I also understand incentives. If we let everyone with a sympathetic story stay in our country, we’ll have no border control at all. Therefore, we need to advocate for tough policies that will cause pain for some individuals but will benefit American society as a whole. It’s the ability to make difficult, rational, and correct decisions rather than be manipulated by our emotions that defines good leadership.

Clinton references the Minnesota ICE vigilantes as embodying what columnist Adam Serwer calls “neighborism,” essentially helping your neighbors regardless of their background. But what she ignores is that the “neighbors” he lionizes are largely violent felons, child sex abusers, fraudsters, and other criminals.

The Mouth of the Foolish

Perhaps the most problematic element of Clinton’s discussion of empathy is her unserious understanding of Christian teachings. Clinton accuses “far right” Christian leaders who support Trump of jettisoning the traditional Christian virtues of dignity, mercy, and compassion. Though these are important virtues, contra Clinton, they are not the only Christian virtues. The mainline denominations such as hers that have behaved as if they are the only Christian virtues for at least the last several decades are in a rapid state of collapse.

Christian statesmanship requires the careful balancing of many virtues, not simply holding to one alone, which is often twisted into an unrecognizable shape. In some cases, compassion and empathy are necessary; in other cases, you need a steel spine. This does not contradict compassion or empathy rightly understood, but points to their biblical limits. An understanding of empathy that results in the destruction of a nation is not empathy as the Scriptures teach.

Clinton attacks Trump, JD Vance, and their supporters for criticizing the Rev. Mariann Budde, who lectured Trump about compassion for immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and other “marginalized” people during a service at Washington National Cathedral the day after Trump’s inauguration. But the anger Trump and others directed toward Budde was not because of her political views. It was because she took a special moment in which the president was honoring her and the congregation to lecture him in a shallow and narcissistic way about her particular policy preferences, while showing no empathy whatsoever for Trump or his supporters who oppose her views for sincere reasons. Budde was selectively “empathetic,” utterly lacking in prudence and judgment. “She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way,” Trump wrote immediately afterwards.

Clinton also targets noted conservative Christian podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey for her book Toxic Empathy, which Clinton calls “an oxymoron.” “I don’t know if the phrase reflects moral blindness or moral bankruptcy, but either way it’s appalling,” she writes. Again, Clinton shows her own lack of empathy for her political opponents. If she were seriously engaged with the arguments of Stuckey’s book, she would have quickly noticed the book’s subtitle—How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. Stuckey does not inveigh against compassion in principle, but points out how the Left has hijacked it for its own political ends. Instead, Clinton huffs that this is “not what I believe Jesus preached in his short time on Earth.”

Although she does muster kind words for Erika Kirk’s radical Christian forgiveness, she again shows her own theological shallowness. As individual Christians we are called upon to personally forgive those who have wronged us (assuming forgiveness has been sincerely asked for). But the Christian magistrate is equally compelled to demand justice for the community. Clearly, Clinton didn’t teach this in Sunday School, which is why her kindergarten version of Christian morality is in the process of killing every church body it has infected.

Clinton claims to be shocked that 25% of Republicans and 40% of self-described Christian nationalists think that “empathy is a dangerous emotion that undermines our ability to set up a society that is guided by God’s truth.” But that’s because they have seen how the Left has weaponized empathy in the service of its disastrous policy proposals.

“MAGA sees a world of vengeance, scorn, and humiliation, and cannot imagine generosity or solidarity,” Clinton argues at the article’s conclusion. But it is exactly because of my deep solidarity with my fellow Americans that I am willing to fight for them and their interests on issues like immigration. Surface-level empathy works at opposite purposes of long-term social health, even though other Christians and I will be scorned by the likes of Clinton for doing so. Conservatives have empathy not just for the illegal immigrant in front of us, but also for the taxpayers who have to support him or her, and for the many Americans who see the myriad problems that accompany mass immigration.

“Maybe they recognize the humanity of an undocumented immigrant family and decide that mass deportation has gone too far,” Clinton hopes. But I recognize the humanity of each and every one of these families. And I also realize that if I based my policy preferences on simply recognizing their humanity, I would not be able to justify closing the border to anyone (save perhaps the worst criminals), thus leading to a societal disaster.

If MAGA people give genuine, heartfelt hugs to illegals as we put them on deportation flights, will Clinton and her fellow Democrats stop their obstruction of justice? Somehow, I suspect it’s not likely.

There are times, for example, after a victory in a war, when any good Christian leader will show mercy and empathy. By contrast, at times like ours when the nation’s social fabric is being torn by unchecked immigration, a wise Christian leader must stand firm for the long-term interests of his people and reject the Left’s emotional manipulation, which Clinton has been practicing for decades.

Interestingly, her commencement address to Wellesley College in 1969 shows that her misunderstanding of the role of empathy in politics is deep-seated and fundamental to her worldview:

Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything…. We’d feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible…. We’re not interested in social reconstruction; it’s human reconstruction…. But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation.

In this statement, spoken more than 50 years ago, we see the dangerous roots of Clinton’s empathy. Her embrace of what Thomas Sowell called the “unconstrained vision of humanity” defines the Left. She attempts to make the impossible possible, thus nullifying the need to make difficult choices between competing goods. Sadly, judging by her most recent article, she seems not to have learned much more about human nature in the decades since she was an undergraduate.