There is a strain of self-righteousness running through the heart of the modern American right that is as bewildering as it is destructive. It is a profound conviction of virtue, a belief that their political project—no matter how callous or destructive—is both necessary and morally righteous. This is not the quiet satisfaction of a person living by their principles. It is the loud, performative certainty of someone who believes they are doing God’s work by making the world harder for people they do not know and do not care to understand.
They believe themselves virtuous. This is the key. They are not merely implementing policy. They are cleansing the temple. And in their quest for purification, they have convinced themselves that cruelty is not a regrettable byproduct, and is a necessary tool of justice.
The Virtue of Harshness: Immigration
Consider the rhetoric surrounding immigration. The MAGA movement and its intellectual outriders have successfully framed the southern border not as a complex humanitarian and logistical challenge, but as a battlefield. In this war, every undocumented immigrant is a potential criminal, a carrier of disease, or a drain on the nation’s soul. This is a deliberate act of mass dehumanization.
When former Trump advisor Stephen Miller architected the “zero tolerance” policy that ripped children from their parents, it was presented as a virtuous act of deterrence. The cruelty was the point. It was a signal to the base that their leader was willing to do what was necessary, unburdened by the sentimental weakness of empathy. His supporters saw this as a sign of strength. They believed it was virtuous to inflict trauma on families in the name of “order.” They were protecting America from the “other,” and the suffering of that other was, at best, irrelevant.
This belief system requires a profound lack of curiosity. It requires one to look at a population of millions, fleeing violence and poverty, and see only the “few bad apples” that right-wing media uses to paint a picture of an invading horde. The countless families seeking a better life, the very same ambition that built this country, are rendered invisible. Their humanity is an inconvenient detail in a much simpler, more satisfying story of good versus evil.
The Moral Calculus of Austerity
This same perverse moral logic applies to the perennial war on the social safety net. The modern conservative argument against programs like Medicaid is rarely framed as a simple budgetary concern. It is framed as a moral crusade against the “lazy,” the “undeserving,” and the “takers.”
There is a deeply ingrained belief that a significant portion of people relying on government assistance are not sick, or disabled, or working three jobs and still unable to afford health insurance, but are simply lazy individuals who would rather play video games than work. This caricature allows them to feel virtuous when they call for cuts to these programs. They aren’t taking healthcare away from a struggling single mother. They are imposing discipline on a freeloader. They are teaching a moral lesson about personal responsibility.
The fact that many of them, or their own parents, may benefit from government programs that go by a different name is an irony that is blissfully ignored. Those are earned benefits. Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance are “handouts.” The distinction is not based on economics, but on a moral judgment about the character of the recipient.
The Righteousness of Distant Violence
Nowhere is this deficit of empathy more apparent than in foreign policy. There is a faction on the right that speaks of dropping bombs on foreign capitals with a casual, almost gleeful, detachment. They believe it is virtuous to support the leveling of neighborhoods in Gaza because, in their minds, every person in that territory is a potential Hamas sympathizer. The hundreds of thousands of innocent children and civilians caught in the crossfire are just collateral damage in a righteous war against evil.
Similarly, their support for Israel is often not rooted in a nuanced understanding of geopolitical strategy or a genuine concern for the Jewish people’s safety, but in a rigid, eschatological timetable. Many evangelicals believe a strong, undivided Israel is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Christ. In this framework, the lives and rights of Palestinians are a trivial obstacle on the path to fulfilling a biblical prophecy.
In their minds, they are not endorsing violence; they are acting as protectors. They are shielding Israel, or America, or “Western Civilization” from its enemies. That the “protection” involves the suffering of countless innocents is a detail they have taught themselves to overlook for what they perceive as the greater good.
The core of it all is a worldview that flattens the complexities of human life into a simple binary. There is an “us” and a “them.” We are the virtuous, the hard-working, the deserving. They are the lazy, the criminal, the undeserving. And once you have made that distinction, any action taken against “them” becomes, by definition, an act of virtue. It is a closed loop, a moral fortress impervious to facts, to reason, and, most of all, to empathy.