Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Sowell

Sowell is puncturing a branding campaign, not offering a neutral observation. By calling the “vision” of compassionate liberals versus colder conservatives “pervasive,” he frames it as a cultural default - a story so widely repeated it becomes moral common sense. The move is strategic: if politics is understood primarily as a contest of empathy, then policy arguments get pre-sorted into heroes and villains before the numbers, tradeoffs, or incentives ever show up.

The subtext is an accusation of moral asymmetry. Sowell isn’t merely saying conservatives care too; he’s implying liberals gain an unearned ethical premium, while conservatives are forced to argue from a defensive crouch, cast as suspiciously heartless even when their case is about long-run harm reduction. That’s classic Sowell: shift the conversation from intentions to consequences, from sentiments to systems. “Compassionate” becomes a contested term - less about feeling and more about whether policies actually help the people they claim to help.

Context matters. Sowell’s career sits inside the late-20th-century American pivot where “compassion” became a political credential, especially in debates over welfare, crime, education, and the administrative state. His broader body of work treats many well-meaning interventions as pipelines to dependency, perverse incentives, or bureaucratic self-protection. So the line functions as an ideological counterspell: stop rewarding the rhetoric of care; start auditing who pays, who benefits, and what the second-order effects look like.

It works because it targets identity rather than a single policy. Sowell is fighting a narrative infrastructure - the moral résumé that decides, before the argument begins, whose motives get trusted.