October 23, 2023

THE DAY THE DELUSIONS DIED: A lot of people woke up on October 7 as progressives and went to bed that night feeling like conservatives. What changed?

When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.

A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?

The best way to answer that question is with the help of Thomas Sowell, one of the most brilliant public intellectuals alive today. In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions. In this now-classic, he offers a simple and powerful explanation of why people disagree about politics. We disagree about politics, Sowell argues, because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature.

Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.

By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.

Hamas’s barbarism—and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence—have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one.

On the flip side, as Don Surber writes: The Nazis are winning — society accepts and promotes anti-Semitism again. “I was lectured long and often last year about how Ukraine was a fight for democracy even as Zelensky banned opposition parties and shut down elections. Here we have a legitimate democracy — Israel — facing an existential threat from rapists and executioners and I do not hear anyone in Washington talking about democracy. But they go on and on and talk about proportionate punishment as if Palestinians are just unruly children and not cutthroats who want to destroy Israel and kill Jews from the river to the sea. German Nazis used education camps to indoctrinate their youth. American Nazis use Harvard.”

Related:

Earlier: Reaction to Hamas massacre shows it’s time to decolonize the campus.

Iowahawk suggests something a bit more drastic:

UPDATE: KJP’s whataboutism was in accordance to the prophecy:

Posted at 8:17 pm by Ed Driscoll