POLITICS: Feeling sympathy for Maduro — a dictator — is the wrong vibe

Something strange is happening in the reaction to Nicolás Maduro’s arrest, and I’m seeing the same thing play out almost every day in my therapy practice in Manhattan and Washington, DC.

People who once spoke clearly about the suffering in Venezuela are suddenly treating Maduro not as the man who helped cause it, but as someone being wronged.

In fact, a lot of the same people who marched for Black Lives Matter, showed up at No Kings rallies, embraced hard-line pro-Palestinian activism or romanticized figures like Luigi Mangione are now expressing sympathy for a dictator.

It’s not because they suddenly studied Venezuela and gained insight they didn’t have before. It’s because a certain feeling gets triggered. That feeling tells them who is supposed to be the victim and who the villain is, long before they look at accurate information.

As I write in my forthcoming book, “Therapy Nation,” people no longer argue about facts. They argue about feelings.

We used to start with “What happened?” Now the question is “Who am I supposed to feel for?”

Once that’s set, everything else changes. Harm gets softened. Abuse of power gets explained away as “context.” Morals move to the back seat.

The far left’s view of Maduro is a perfect example.

For years he was the villain behind Venezuela’s collapse and the reason why millions of Venezuelans fled the country, many seeking asylum in the United States. Now that he’s in US custody, he’s magically recast as a symbol of American overreach.

Nothing about his behavior changed. Only the framing did. Emotion replaces logic.

The far left can flip on a dime depending on which role they need filled that day: hero, victim, villain. The roles shift depending on the story they want to tell.  

And make no mistake: the villain role is the one that remains constant. They always need someone to play the bad guy. There’s always a villain. That’s why, no matter what Donald Trump says or accomplishes, a substantial portion of the left will always see him the same way.

The casting was done years ago. It doesn’t matter what he actually does. He’s the permanent villain in their emotional script.

Clinically, this is what happens when people stop looking at behavior and let emotion drive everything.

Once you decide who the “real victim” is supposed to be, the facts stretch to fit the feeling. Wrongdoing becomes relative. Even violence or dictatorship gets explained away as “complicated.”

I watch smaller versions of this unfold every week. A patient will describe someone who hurt them, then immediately retreat. “But I feel bad judging them,” they say.

They’re trying to avoid the discomfort of recognizing that someone can be sympathetic in one moment and harmful in another. That same discomfort is now shaping national reactions.

There’s also a social cost to being on the “wrong” side. So people overcorrect. They signal loyalty to whatever cause they’ve attached themselves to, even when their position makes no moral sense. Feeling aligned matters more than being accurate.

Maduro is simply the newest object for that projection.

People aren’t defending him as a leader. They’re defending the feeling of being on the side of the oppressed, even when the facts point in the opposite direction. That’s how you end up with people condemning a dictator one week and sympathizing with him the next.

And when feelings take over, strongmen start to look like underdogs. Dictators start to seem misunderstood. Meanwhile, the people who actually suffered under their rule fade out of view.

This moment says less about Maduro and more about the culture we’ve built, a culture where emotion outweighs evidence and sympathy is assigned based on the story someone fits, not the actions they take.

If we want to stop these wild flips, we have to get back to judging behavior instead of identity. The world isn’t harder to understand. We’ve just let feelings do the thinking.

Jonathan Alpert is a psychotherapist in New York City and Washington, DC, and author of the forthcoming book “Therapy Nation.” Follow him at x.com/JonathanAlpert.