Political types are often tempted to ascribe their opponents’ undesirable ideological positions to their being paid, evil, stupid, or in thrall in one way or another to a dastardly enemy lurking somewhere behind the scenes. This temptation is understandable but misguided. There are, indeed, a few among us whose commitments are the product of perfidy, ignorance, or greed, but mostly we remain infantry within what Thomas Sowell famously termed our “conflict of visions.” Why is it the case that, as Sowell put it, “the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again”? Because, he proposed, each side is animated by an opposite “sense of how the world works.” In consequence, Sowell concluded, the bulk of our contemporary political disagreements are the result not of varying exposure to the facts but of differing moral intuitions and value judgments.
Sowell was writing in the 1980s, and he focused on the divide between the left, which exhibits what he terms the “unconstrained vision,” and the right, which exhibits the “constrained vision.” To my mind, his work is as persuasive today as it was then, and it continues to explain many of the fault lines within our politics. Nevertheless, I might offer an addendum to his theory that I believe is of growing importance in our era: that, in addition to one’s view of human nature, the most potent predictor of one’s current political disposition is whether one is comfortable living in America as it actually exists in the year 2026 or one so resents the present for its many perceived failings that one wishes one had lived in an earlier time.
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