THE FALLACY OF MOOD AFFILIATION, as spotted by Kevin D. Williamson, who writes in a study in contrarianism, “From Polio to Poverty, We Are Winning:”

The world isn’t ending.

To the economist Tyler Cowen the world is indebted for the phrase “the fallacy of mood affiliation,” which he explains:

It seems to me that people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those views by the mood. I call this the “fallacy of mood affiliation,” and it is one of the most underreported fallacies in human reasoning. In the context of economic growth debates, the underlying mood is often “optimism” or “pessimism” per se and then a bunch of ought-to-be-independent views fall out from the chosen mood.

This is a more eloquent version of what I sometimes refer to as the black-hats/white-hats school of political analysis. Examples of that are the fact that a great many people with an interest in Israeli–Palestinian issues begin and end consideration of any particular fact by asking whose fault it is (in the case of negative developments) or who gets the credit (in the case of positive developments). You know the type: If a hurricane should come crashing into the Holy Land, the imams and the progressive columnists will find a way to blame it on the Jews.

The Right engages in a fair amount of mood affiliation: The country must have suffered ruination, because the Obama administration, abetted by the hated “Republican establishment,” can have done nothing but ruin the country. But then you visit New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago, or you drive across northern Mississippi or the Texas Panhandle and see all those splendid farms and technology companies and factories producing all the best things that mankind can dream of, and, well, it certainly doesn’t look like a ruined country. In the past few years, I’ve been to the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and a few years further back India, Colombia, the Dominican Republic — it doesn’t look like ruined world. Of course there are unhappy corners: Haiti, Pakistan.

Francis Fukuyama was mocked for declaring “the end of history” as the Cold War came to a close, but he wasn’t really wrong. Haiti and Pakistan, and the territories currently held by the so-called Islamic State, do not represent the emergence of a credible competitor to liberal democracy; they are only failed states, and failure is something of which there is, alas, to be no end.

Read the whole thing.