conservatism
By Eric Levitz, features writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and economics
Earlier this month, Hamas militants butchered 1,400 Israeli Jews, thereby proving conservatives are right about everything.
Or so argues Konstantin Kisin in a much-touted essay for The Free Press.
In “The Day the Delusions Died,” Kisin explains that Hamas’s attack and the left’s reaction to it have vindicated the right’s conception of human nature and the positions on immigration and “the West” that follow logically from it. As a result, the events of October 7 and 8 triggered “an overnight exodus” from the progressive camp to the conservative one.
There is a kernel of half-truth to Kisin’s narrative. The fact that some social-justice activists and organizations either celebrated Hamas’s attack as “decolonization” or held Israel entirely responsible for it did alienate some liberals. There have always been genuine tensions between liberal universalism and fringe variants of identity politics that exempt oppressed people from all moral judgment and/or venerate the ethnic chauvinism of subaltern groups. The spectacle of putative progressives cheering an Islamist group’s mass murder of Jewish children certainly heightened these contradictions.
Of course, a rational liberal observer would recognize that such moral idiocy was confined to a small minority of the left, one with negligible political power. America’s most prominent socialist politicians — Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — condemned Hamas in no uncertain terms. Such an observer would also note that the present war has exposed no small number of war-crime apologists on the right and in the center, with Newsweek columnist Caroline Glick suggesting that even Palestinian kindergartners aren’t truly “innocent civilians.”
Nevertheless, a conservative polemicist could whip up a coherent (if misleading) column about how the far left’s Hamas cheerleading has forced its center-left sympathizers to grapple with the perils of wokeness or whatever.
But coherence isn’t Kisin’s strong suit. In the world of right-wing infotainment, the capacity to formulate reasoned arguments is no precondition for success. Kisin’s expertise lies in playing the role of an impartial “classical liberal” whose unblinkered view of reality allows him to recognize that conservatives are right about everything. This job requires some real skills. One needs to have a knack for speaking off the cuff and performing a facsimile of intellectual rigor (on this front, Kisin is much aided by his possession of a British accent). Yet as the success of Kisin’s Triggernometry podcast makes clear, assuring conservatives that any serious, broad-minded thinker would recognize the validity of their grievances does not actually require one to be a serious, broad-minded thinker.
Kisin opens his column with an anecdote: A friend of his said she “woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative.” He asserts that Hamas’s attack sent countless other liberals on the same ideological journey and sets out to explain why.
In Kisin’s account, the answer can be found in Thomas Sowell’s 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions. Sowell writes that the fundamental divide between progressives and conservatives concerns two disparate conceptions of human nature. The former believe our nature is “unconstrained” by biology or any other timeless fact of human existence; the latter believe our nature is constrained by such forces.
Here is how Kisin, following Sowell, characterizes the progressive perspective on this question:
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.
See AlsoKonstantin Kisin | Expensivity
Just four paragraphs into Kisin’s piece, the reader is already knee-deep in fallacies. For one thing, no progressive with any political power has called for the complete elimination of all economic inequality. Nor have they endorsed abolishing the police and the Pentagon by 2050 on the grounds that crime and war will surely be over by then. It is true that many liberals (correctly) believe poverty is not inevitable; during the pandemic, we saw the government cut child poverty in half in just a few weeks. But even on that front, no left-of-center party in the U.S. or U.K. is actually calling for anti-poverty spending high enough to eliminate material deprivation. Joe Biden’s ambition was merely to permanently reduce the number of American children in poverty by 50 percent, and even this proved too radical for many in his party.
The politically salient argument between the left and the right is not about whether inequality or poverty can be eliminated but rather whether public policy should aim to reduce both. And that debate can’t be settled by ponderous invocations of “human nature.” You don’t need to make any naïve assumptions about humanity’s fundamental character to believe public policy can reduce poverty and inequality while sustaining economic growth. You just need to know that Scandinavia exists (and/or look at a single chart of U.S. income distribution before and after the Reagan era).
It is obviously true that policymakers can impact the relative prevalence of inequality, poverty, crime, and war. Making a coherent case for the conservative perspective on these issues requires defending the substance of the GOP (or Tory) agenda.
It is indeed silly to believe a modern industrial economy could function well without any inequality whatsoever (if people who dedicated years of their lives to the arduous study and practice of medicine could not expect to earn a wage premium as a result of such efforts, we would surely have too few doctors). But establishing that full communism is a bad idea doesn’t tell us why slashing Medicaid is a good one. Of course, the whole point of Kisin’s rhetorical gambit is to dodge the burden of defending conservative fiscal priorities on their merits. Talk enough about humanity’s incurable fallibility and the evils of totalitarianism, and your audience may forget that Stalin has been dead for 70 years and that the Anglophone center-left is led by Biden and Keir Starmer.
If Kisin’s account of the partisan divide on human nature is specious, his application of that theoretical framework to the Israel-Hamas conflict is nonsensical.
Kisin rattles off examples of left-of-center groups and institutions responding to the October 7 attacks in ways that range from morally heinous to perfectly defensible (in the latter category, Kisin criticizes universities for simply choosing not to publish an institutional statement about the war). He then suggests that the woke left’s contempt for Israeli life “shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities.” In reality, the ideology is merely about “power.”
This revelation was surprising to those “still clinging to the unconstrained vision” of human nature, he writes. Those who recognize that human nature is unchangeable, by contrast, saw the left’s apologias for Hamas coming, since “if there is any constant in human history, it is that revolutionaries always feel entitled to destroy those who stand in their way.”
Yet this is a claim about the nature of revolutionaries, not human beings. One could posit that humans as a species fundamentally care about power, not protecting victims, and that every ideology is therefore just a smokescreen concealing a will for social dominance. But that’s an idea conservatives generally disparage as “postmodern” nihilism. I don’t think Kisin believes that his own ideological group’s avowed concern for the victims of Hamas or the “woke mob” is just a tactic for winning power. But if he doesn’t think that, then he isn’t actually making any claims about human nature; he’s just saying leftists are bad and have always been bad.
His argument gets even more confused when he zeroes in on specific issues. Now that the Hamas attacks have revealed that human nature is “constrained,” he reasons, liberals will be forced to recognize that conservatives are right about immigration.
What is the connection between believing that human nature is largely constant and supporting restrictions on immigration? Kisin offers none beyond the observation that the word constrained can be used to describe a restrictive immigration policy, while the word unconstrained can be used to describe a liberal one. As he writes, “For decades, both Europe and America basked in an ‘unconstrained vision’ of immigration.”
But here, Kisin is just free-associating. His argument is no more coherent than the claim that, since human nature is fundamentally constrained, people should sing in a constrained vocal style free of scatting or shouting.
There is no reason why one can’t simultaneously believe that human nature is “constrained” and support an “unconstrained” (which, in Kisin’s usage, merely means expansive, not literally unconstrained) immigration policy. In fact, if one believes human nature is mostly fixed and insensitive to the peculiar norms and institutions of a given society, then one may be more inclined to support high levels of immigration. After all, the more uniform all humans are in our nature, the easier it will be to integrate foreigners into any given society.
Kisin’s own skepticism of open immigration is seemingly rooted in a belief that human nature is highly malleable, such that people forged by foreign cultures will struggle to assimilate into western ones. He doesn’t say this outright, but he implies that recent immigrant communities subscribe to values that are antithetical to the West’s, writing, “It is much harder to pretend that allowing people to enter our country illegally is a moral good when you watch some of them celebrate mass murder in the streets of your capital cities.”
Kisin’s reflections on how October 7 should change immigration politics aren’t just in tension with his claims about “human nature” but also his purported commitment to free speech. His whole shtick is that he’s a stalwart supporter of both free-speech rights and an ethos of free and open debate. Yet in his essay, he approvingly notes that, having now recognized human nature as constrained, “France has banned pro-Palestine protests and warned that foreign nationals who take part will be removed from the country.”
To Kisin, moralistic scolds mobbing conservatives on social media is a threat to free speech. But a government legally prohibiting its citizens from demonstrating in favor of a specific political position — and threatening to deport foreign nationals who take part in such demonstrations — is just an example of policymakers belatedly recognizing Sowell’s brilliance.
Kisin concludes by arguing that Hamas’s attack should lead liberals to rethink their hostility toward the West:
If you consider yourself “liberal” or even “progressive,” it must surely be clear by now that America and her allies are the only places in the world where your values are even considered values. If our civilization is allowed to collapse, it will not be replaced by a progressive utopia. It will be replaced by chaos and barbarism.
Put aside the merits of Kisin’s claims. If one posits that human beings will behave barbarically in one social context but like bleeding-heart liberals in a different one, aren’t you saying human nature is very sensitive to social conditions? Isn’t one straightforward implication of Kisin’s veneration of “the West” that, as he puts it, “social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better”? Indeed, hasn’t the way we’ve organized collective action in the West overcome a wide range of social evils, such as the legal subjugation of women and the practice of slavery?
In truth, Kisin’s column is not an act of reasoning so much as an impersonation of the same. It is a bunch of tangentially associated ruminations molded into the shape of an essay. Its invocation of Sowell’s reflections on human nature serves as a signifier of gravitas, rather than a theoretical foundation for a coherent argument. The point is to signal that conservatives have very deep reasons for believing that the left sucks.
Alas, as the column’s warm reception illustrates, red America’s reading public isn’t asking its intellectuals for anything more.
Tags:
- conservatism
- israel-hamas war
- free speech
- immigration
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