The classic case of making a picture, of course, was Neville Chamberlain.

One attraction of this sort of thing for its practitioners is that they do not have to understand the other side. All that messy learning about the other’s culture and the ideas the other side holds is short-circuited. It’s much easier to imagine that somebody like Bashir Asad, or the Hamas thugs, are motivated by goals a Westerner educated in the Ivy League or Oxbridge or the ENA can understand and relate to. These are, due to the wide influence of Marxism in our intellectual culture even among non-Marxists, primarily economic. If we get the economics right all else follows. Our elites do not understand people who will prefer war and power hunger to economic betterment for the people they lead, but that is what they must deal with. And the people are content to be led to such goals instead of economic betterment, for the goals flatter their non-economic views of themselves. Besides, they figure that once they have got the power they can get the money too, without the need to work for it.