Why so many Americans now sympathize with the villain

Hollywood’s biggest prize this year went to “One Battle After Another,” a film that asks audiences to sympathize with terrorists. In New York, an upcoming production, “Luigi: The Musical,” places a criminal at the center of the story just blocks from the crime that inspired it.

Neither work created this reaction. They’re tapping into a broader cultural willingness to identify with people we once clearly condemned. Across culture and public life, we are becoming more willing to reinterpret wrongdoing through the language of grievance, alienation and institutional distrust. The transgression itself hasn’t changed. What has is our growing tendency to emotionally identify with the anger behind it.

As a practicing psychotherapist in New York and Washington, I see a version of this shift up close. People are increasingly inclined to explain behavior in ways that soften it, contextualize it and make it easier to accept. We are no longer just trying to understand wrongdoing. We are rehearsing sympathy for it. Over time, that sympathy starts to crowd out judgment.

Part of this shift is rooted in declining trust. When people lose faith in institutions, they don’t stop making moral judgments — they relocate them. If the system feels rigged, defiance starts to look less like misconduct and more like courage.

Psychology helps explain why this resonates so deeply. When systems feel too large or unaccountable, frustration looks for a face. Most people cannot confront a bureaucracy or overhaul an economic system, but they can point to a CEO. They can condemn a billionaire. They can turn a criminal into a symbol. What begins as understanding can become a way of avoiding responsibility.

I hear this reframing in my own practice. A patient frustrated by medical bills tells me he “kind of gets” someone like Luigi. He quickly adds that he does not condone violence, but he understands the anger. Another patient, struggling with rising costs, shrugs and says, “It’s all rigged,” before talking about billionaires with open contempt. In both cases, the target stops being a person and becomes a symbol. The system is abstract, but the villain is concrete.

This is where the civic danger begins. Once people are reduced to symbols of everything that feels broken, moral boundaries begin to loosen. This shows up across the political spectrum. When opponents are treated as beyond redemption, restraint erodes. If someone is defined as evil, almost any response can begin to feel justified.

We have already seen flashes of this in public life, from people celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk to others expressing disappointment that attempts on President Trump’s life failed. In both cases, the reaction reveals the same erosion of moral restraint, Once a public figure is reduced to a symbol of everything people hate, violence can start to feel emotionally satisfying. That is a sign that moral boundaries are truly shifting.

Social media accelerates the process. Nuance doesn’t spread, but moral certainty does. Complex individuals are reduced to symbols: hero or villain, rebel or tyrant. Once that happens, judgment narrows and outrage becomes its own kind of social glue.

Cultural institutions play a role as well. Universities, entertainment and parts of the intellectual class increasingly frame wrongdoing through the language of explanation rather than responsibility. Trauma, inequality and alienation become the dominant lens. Those factors can matter. But when explanation consistently replaces judgment, the line between understanding behavior and excusing it begins to blur.

There is also a psychological payoff. Shared outrage creates clarity and belonging. A common enemy can make people feel morally certain in a culture that otherwise feels unstable. But that clarity comes at a cost. It becomes easier to divide the world into good and evil than to tolerate complexity, ambiguity or restraint.

A musical about a criminal doesn’t create this appetite — rather, it reflects a broader shift in how Americans process anger, distrust and blame. Authority starts to feel hollow. Transgression starts to feel authentic. We once feared villains because they represented moral breakdown. Now we increasingly use them to organize our grievances.

The danger isn’t that we fail to recognize wrongdoing, but that we become so comfortable explaining it, contextualizing it and identifying with it that we eventually start excusing it. And when that happens, civic restraint begins to erode right along with it.

Jonathan Alpert is a psychotherapist practicing in New York City and Washington and author of the forthcoming book “Therapy Nation.”