Empathy as Bug: The Rhetoric of MAGA’s “Battle”

Abstract

This essay critiques the rhetorical displacement of empathy by sympathy in contemporary political discourse, especially within digital media ecologies dominated by memes, grievance, and identitarian performativity. Beginning with Elon Musk’s claim that empathy is “civilizational suicide,” the essay traces how sympathetic identification—rooted in sameness and affective fusion—has supplanted empathy’s difficult labor of encountering difference. Drawing on rhetorical theory, affect studies, and close readings of memes, the essay analyzes how contemporary rhetorics (including on the Left) impede the slow, uncertain, and unsentimental work that empathy requires. Turning to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and theories of rhetorical empathy, the essay reframes empathy not as moral sentiment but as agonistic hearkening—a practice of nonidentical attunement amid algorithmic closure. Ultimately, it calls for rhetorical scholars to reclaim empathy as a counter-rhetorical and ontological necessity in the face of post-truth tribalism.