Stop Telling Leftists They’re Good People
Advice from a Man of the Left to People Who've Falsely Surrendered the Moral High Ground
There’s a particular kind of conversation you’ve probably had—or watched, or enabled—that goes something like this: someone makes a claim steeped in tribal self-flattery, and you reflexively recoil. You think “that’s not quite right.” Maybe you even offer evidence against it, and the person who might—in other circumstances—consider the evidence rationally…instead abandons any pretense of good-faith inquiry and critique. Even if, moments before, they were praising the virtues of rationality (with that praise premised on their tribe’s own facility with it).
They suddenly can’t find the exit fast enough, or maybe you can’t. Either way, the data doesn’t land. The methodology doesn’t register. What is revealed instead is a rapid reorientation around why the challenge itself is suspect, why the challenger’s motives are compromised, why the specific case under examination is an exception, and why, when you zoom out far enough, their side is still obviously better.
This is not stupidity. It’s not even, in most cases, dishonesty in the conventional sense. It’s something more structural, more insidious, and far more familiar than we tend to admit—it’s the behavior of someone whose self-concept depends on a belief remaining intact. So today I call it what it is: the logic of an addict.
Profile in Pernicious Priors
Not long ago I watched a woman—we’ll call her K—open a public thread by lamenting the failures of her political milieu. She named the problems clearly: the sophistry, the gish gallops, the people who beg you to elaborate and then go silent when you do. She invoked the difficulty of being someone who genuinely values evidence, who grants she can be wrong, who has been persuaded of things before and thinks she will be again. Who expects the same of her interlocutors and keeps getting disappointed. She identified herself, in effect, as a critical thinker trapped among tribalists. I thought she was a kindred spirit.
Thirty minutes later, after she’d talked about something I recognized was wrong, and I presented her with behavioral data on empathy, the whole dynamic shifted. I had peer-reviewed research, a meta-analysis, a citation list. The specific claim under examination was one she had made in passing. She said that her leftie friends “at least have empathy still going for them.” A self-flattering narrative. A pernicious prior. Casually stated, as flattering priors tend to be. I was gentle with her, given all this.
Her response was immediate and, in its way, instructive. State capacity is better than private charity. USAID. “Conservatives” are doing wrong, and they’re still worse than progressives. And then, most tellingly: outgroup hostility toward conservatives from leftists isn’t the same as the bad kind of outgroup hostility, because conservatives are bad enough to deserve it. Even where she granted the findings, she rationalized them.
In four short paragraphs she had done the following: changed the subject twice, introduced a whataboutist deflection, and—without appearing to notice the irony—demonstrated the very things she was disputing or decrying. She ended by arguing, more or less explicitly, that her in-group’s hostility toward its enemies is definitionally moral, which means the data could never have touched her in the first place. The conclusion was sealed before the evidence arrived.
This is what I mean by addiction logic. K wasn’t lying. She is, by her own account, a genuinely educated person. But she has a belief that flatters her, that places her and her political tribe on the correct side of the most important moral ledger, and when that belief came under evidential pressure, her schooling did not protect her. It served the belief instead. She was also almost certainly, it must be said, aggressively autistic…and eventually she forced me to block her because she wouldn’t peaceably disengage.
I’m not telling you all this to mock K. I’m telling you this because people like K are not anomalies, they are the rule. And the people around K—the ones who nodded along when she called herself a “critical thinker,” the ones who will nod along when she explains why my data was bad or my motives were suspect—are the problem this essay is actually about. Whether they exist on the left, the right, or the center.
Knowing Who We’re Talking About
Let me be precise about terms, because the taxonomy here has been so thoroughly mangled by a decade of Twitter-adjacent poli-slop that we cannot proceed without clearing the ground. And because the people most directly implicated, along with all their enablers, exist across a vast political landscape.
“Leftist” does not mean “Marxist.” It does not mean “woke,” or whatever the current term of art is for the left’s more performative wing. Leftism is a broad political tradition encompassing social democracy, labor liberalism, democratic socialism, and yes, its more radical variants. Many leftists are moderate. Many people who call themselves liberals are, by any reasonable political science definition, leftists. The dichotomy of “leftists vs. liberals” that metastasized on social media sometime around 2015 is not a real distinction with serious intellectual roots. Political scientists, would call that dichotomy retarded (maybe sans that specific word) in the same way biologists would admit it’s retarded to say humans aren’t primates.
What’s meant by people who say things like “liberals aren’t leftist” is roughly that liberals aren’t leftwing extremists. What’s meant by saying humans aren’t primates is that we don’t swing from trees or walk on all fours. But words actually do mean things—humans are a breed of primate by biology, and liberals are a breed of leftist. Enough dumb fumbling at territorial disputes dressed up as a taxonomy. The adults need to wrestle with serious questions.
The argument I’m making is not about the far left specifically. It’s not a hit piece on socialism or an apologia for conservatism. Moderate left politics—a preference for redistribution, a concern for structural inequality, a commitment to labor protections and civil rights—is, like moderate right politics, a legitimate and often admirable political orientation. Most political views, held with appropriate tentativeness and intellectual honesty, are morally neutral. They’re wagers about government questions, about what policies will produce what outcomes. Reasonable people make different bets. Because of course they can. It would be ridiculous to think otherwise. Right?
The pathology I’m diagnosing is not leftism itself. It’s a specific relationship within, and without, leftism as a structure: the kind that treats the ideology and its priors as inherently sanctifying, such that holding them is seen as obviously correct, beyond reproach, and sufficient to make one a good person by rote. The kind where the politics stops being a wager and becomes a sacrament. This is what separates the social drinker from the alcoholic—not the substance, but the relationship to it.
By this diagnostic, plenty of right-wingers are equally afflicted. First by the leftist self-mythology, and second by their own flattering, right-coded self-narratives. Rightists code to themselves about how they’re more pragmatic, plain-speaking and truth-telling, post-political or pre-political even. They insist leftists are the ones injecting politics and irrationality into everything. Yet many of them also believe, paradoxically, that leftists are correct to self-identify as good people purely off their politics.
Centrists do some of this too. Granting that leftists are moral by fiat or self-declaration, right-wingers are mentally sober or stoic by fiat and self-declaration, so on and so forth. For the centrists’ conceptions of themselves, some core myths include the above-the-fray superiority of the Reasonable Person and the idea of being always more correct on the facts by living equidistant from all tribalism or partisanship. They are often the worst of both worlds but think themselves the better of both.
Every political tribe produces its own grade of these drugs and copes. But this essay is about the left’s version, for a specific reason: the left has staked its identity, more explicitly and more persistently than any other modern political tradition, on the claim of moral superiority. Not just policy correctness, but thoroughly rational self-righteousness. It’s there in the language they launder: “empathy” edifices, “compassion” claims, “social justice” and so forth. Implicit in every framing is that leftist politics exists synonymous with human decency. With right politics as its negation. This is what demands examination, because it is most aggressively protected, most institutionally reinforced, and most damaging when left unchallenged.
Follow the Evidence
The evidence against the empathy claim is not ambiguous, and it has been available long enough that continuing to ignore it reveals a profound, almost effortful ignorance. On the part, I’m must underscore again, of more than just the left itself.
Arthur Brooks’ Who Really Cares (2006) found that conservative-headed households give approximately 30% more to charity than liberal-headed ones, despite earning less on average. This is a behavioral measure—what people actually do with their money—not a self-report measure. The finding was subsequently confirmed by a meta-analysis of 31 original studies, which concluded that political conservatives are significantly more charitable than liberals at an overall level.
One can dispute the normative weight of private charity versus state redistribution, as K tried to, but you cannot use that dispute to explain away the behavioral gap. If anything, the preference for state redistribution over private giving, when unaccompanied by greater personal generosity, starts to look less like empathy and more like outsourcing, like freeriding. It’s easy to say you “care” when it literally costs you nothing. Easy to make designs on someone else’s money and then applaud yourself for how you’d hypothetically redirect it to better uses than the originator.
The outgroup hostility data is more direct. A 2025 peer-reviewed study across four experiments found that liberals showed less empathy toward outgroup members than conservatives did. The mechanism is telling: the deficit was explained by liberals judging conservatives as more immoral and less likable—more harshly, the data shows, than conservatives judged liberals. Separate Stanford research found that partisan animosity now exceeds racial hostility as a predictor of behavior, with partisans on both sides dramatically more likely to oppose their children marrying across party lines. And that leftists were more generally hostile to such pairings.
The specific finding that liberals’ empathy gap is driven by moral judgment—that their empathy is conditional on ideological compliance—punctures the self-flattery with particular precision. It isn’t that leftists lack the capacity for empathy. It’s that they deploy empathy as a reward for correct belief. That is not altruism. We are seeing them perform nobility when the reality is much closer to social enforcement wearing pretty clothes—and calling itself by intellectually dishonest yet nice-sounding names.
What we’re describing, at the structural level, is something like Dunning-Kruger applied to moral self-knowledge. The left’s loudest and most confident claims about its own virtue are inversely correlated with behavioral evidence for that virtue. The self-report surveys showing higher liberal empathy scores are measuring group norm compliance—of course a community that has made empathy a core identity marker will self-report higher on empathy scales. That’s evidence of successful socialization into a brand. The question then, is why does everyone else play along?
False Consciousness as Praxis
Marx coined “false consciousness” to describe the way oppressed people internalize the ideological frameworks of the classes that exploit them, mistaking their oppressor’s interests for their own. The irony of applying the concept here is almost too neat, but it’s also not merely rhetorical. False consciousness, in its structural logic, describes any systematic distortion of self-perception that serves the maintenance of a particular social order—including, especially, the self-perception of those who consider themselves its critics.
The false consciousness operating in left political culture is the belief that political affiliation is a reliable proxy for moral character. That holding the correct views—the progressive views, the views that signal care for the marginalized—makes one, in some meaningful sense, a good person. This belief is not argued for. It is assumed. It is repeated, institutionally reinforced, and treated as so obvious that challenging it registers as either bad faith or stupidity. Critics are cowed by the ubiquity alone.
What interest does this flattering narrative serve? Several, and they compound. It provides moral status at low cost—you don’t have to do anything particularly virtuous, you just have to hold the right views and signal them correctly. It insulates against self-examination—if your politics are inherently good, then your actions taken in service of your politics are presumptively good, and scrutiny of those actions is presumptively hostile. It makes coalition maintenance easier. And it creates a powerful enforcement mechanism: to question the moral flattery is to out yourself as someone who doesn’t care about the right things, which in these social environments carries real costs.
This is how emergent self-flattery becomes institutional enforcement. It doesn’t require a conspiracy. It doesn’t require anyone sitting in a room deciding to suppress inconvenient truths. The beaver doesn’t need to be instructed to build a dam—it builds one from whatever materials are available, including the household furniture when raised in a domestic home, because that’s what beavers do. The impulse is natural. But when the dam gets big enough, when the institution is the dam, the natural impulse and the structural incentive become indistinguishable. At that point, the researcher distorts their own methodology without quite noticing they’re doing it. The intellectual mistakes their tribal prior for a conclusion they’ve earned. K genuinely believes she’s engaging in good faith, even amidst the moment it’s clear she isn’t.
The Soviet apologist tradition is the most instructive historical case, because it lasted longest and was most extensively documented. For decades, a significant portion of Western left intellectuals maintained favorable, or at minimum equivocating, positions on the Soviet Union—not because the evidence was unclear, but because the evidence’s implications were too costly. Acknowledging Stalinist atrocities in full meant conceding that the political tradition you had identified with, the one that organized your moral self-concept, had produced something monstrous.
The alternative was a rolling series of rationalizations: the reports were exaggerated, the cause was still just, the historical circumstances were complicated, Western imperialism was worse. Each rationalization required slightly more distortion of the evidentiary record than the last. The pattern is identical, in miniature, to K.’s four paragraphs. Change the subject. Invoke crims of the other side via whataboutism (a literal Soviet tactic). Redefine the terms until the data can’t find you.
Third worldism runs the same play. So does the tradition of laundering regressive values—on gender, sexuality, religious authoritarianism—through the framework of anti-imperialism: the logic that criticism of non-Western practices is inherently colonial, and therefore the left’s commitment to the oppressed requires silence or active defense of practices it would condemn instantly in a Western context. The progressive credentials do the moral laundering. The ideology, having been established as inherently virtuous, becomes a machine for converting any action taken in its name into a virtuous action. This is not a marginal phenomenon. It has been, and remains, central to how the Western left processes its own contradictions.
The insider protection problem follows the same logic at the institutional level. Progressive organizations—media outlets, universities, advocacy groups, publishing houses—have produced a remarkable number of cases in which credentialed insiders were protected from accountability by the presumption that their politics made serious wrongdoing unlikely, or that the cost of accountability to the movement outweighed the cost to the individuals harmed. The politics laundered the person. The person’s failings were treated as exceptions to the political rule, rather than evidence about what the political rule actually predicts.
Follow the Words on the Tin
Here is what the people around K did wrong, and what YOU have likely done wrong, and what I am asking you to stop doing. Immediately and forever, if you please.
When K said her liberal, leftie friends “at least have empathy still going for them,” no one in the thread pushed back. The claim was casual, confident, and delivered as common sense. It was allowed to stand because pushing back on it feels, in the current social atmosphere, like a declaration of tribal allegiance to the wrong tribe. To say that’s not actually true, and here’s the evidence is to invite the accusation that you’re a conservative apologist, that you’re doing the right’s work for them, that your timing is suspicious given everything that’s happening. The social cost of the challenge is real and immediate. The cost of letting the flattery pass is diffuse, abstract, and borne mostly by the quality of everyone’s thinking.
This is the double standard I want to name explicitly, because it operates in broad daylight and almost no one calls it out. The same centrist who would apply rigorous skepticism to a conservative’s claim about, say, crime statistics or welfare dependency will accept on essentially zero evidence the claim that the left is the party of empathy, decency, and care for the marginalized. The same soft-right commentator who would correctly identify motivated reasoning in a progressive policy argument will preface every critique of left culture with a lengthy genuflection to left moral seriousness, as though the critique requires a toll to be paid upfront. This is not balance. This is not fairness. It is asymmetric scrutiny masquerading as intellectual honesty, and it corrupts the analysis of everyone who practices it.
The child who cannot criticize their parents properly—because they have been taught, explicitly or by ambient example, to extend to family a charity they withhold from strangers—does not thereby become a better scion or relative. They just understand their kin less. They are less equipped to help them, less honest in their assessment of them, and more likely to enable the specific failures that most need addressing. The same is true here. Asymmetric charity toward the left, dressed as respect or fairness or above-the-fray magnanimity, is a failure of the most basic intellectual obligation, and it has the additional perverse effect of making the left worse.
We are insulating a third to two fifths of the political ecosystem from the corrective pressure that might otherwise force self-examination. The kina that people like K correctly identified as missing on both sides. The kind that her own behavior demonstrated she cannot sustain. We must all endeavor to do better.
Conclusion
So what does a non-enabling engagement actually look like? You can be simultaneously compassionate toward someone and corrective toward them—the correction, in fact, often flows from the compassion. The person who doesn’t care typically doesn’t bother to intervene. The alcoholic’s friend who says nothing, who pours another round, who laughs off the problem to keep the peace. They are conflict-averse, and they are making the alcoholic’s problem worse by making it comfortable. Compassion that enables self-destruction is not compassion. It’s cowardice, and a performance. All in the service of the enabler’s own comfort.
What the enabler needs to stop doing is validating the self-concept. You don’t tell the alcoholic he’s a bad person. You tell him you love him and you’re worried about him. That you need him to be honest with himself about what you’re both watching happen. The equivalent, in political terms, is not mockery, not tribal counter-assertion, not a mirror-image self-flattery about how your side is actually the virtuous one. It is the refusal to preemptively concede the moral high ground. It is the insistence on applying the same epistemic standard you’d apply to any other claim. It is, when K says her friends “at least have empathy going for them,” saying: do they? What’s your evidence? Here’s mine. That’s not a hostile act. It’s a respectful one. Possibly the most respectful act available, because it takes the person seriously enough to hold them to the standard they claim to hold themselves to.
The taxonomy matters here too. The leftist who holds moderate views with appropriate tentativeness, who is open to challenge and capable of updating, who treats their politics as a wager rather than a sacrament—that person is not the subject of this intervention. They are, in a meaningful sense, already doing the thing. The person who needs the pushback is the one whose politics have become a flattering prior immune to evidence, the one who mistakes the moral vocabulary of their tradition for moral accomplishment. The one who—like K—can articulate the problem with perfect clarity in the abstract and then demonstrate they’re still guilty of it.
You will know them by their resistance to the standard they claim to hold. You will know them by the speed with which they change the subject when the evidence arrives. You will know them by the way their “empathy,” on examination, turns out to be conditional and unfalsifiable. Which means it’s really not worth all that much.
So stop telling them that they’re good people. Not because they’re bad people necessarily, but because the telling is a lie. It doesn’t become true through repetition, and it’s doing real damage instead. Damage which you are complicit in it every time you let the flattering narrative go unchallenged in the interest of social comfort.
Bibliography & Further Reading
Brooks, Arthur C. Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. Basic Books, 2006.
Casey, James P., Eric J. Vanman, and Fiona Kate Barlow. “Empathic Conservatives and Moralizing Liberals: Political Intergroup Empathy Varies by Political Ideology and Is Explained by Moral Judgment.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2025.
Iyengar, Shanto, and Sean J. Westwood. “Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization.” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 59, no. 3, 2015, pp. 690–707.
Yang, Kun, and Rongrong Liu. “Are Conservatives More Charitable Than Liberals in the U.S.? A Meta-Analysis of Political Ideology and Charitable Giving.” Social Science Research, vol. 97, 2021.
This is a fabulous piece.