“I’ve just come from seeing a dead boy – and you killed him.” Those were the words of writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924-1987) from a long-ago television appearance. Years after, Thomas Sowell referenced Baldwin’s appearance in a 1986 opinion piece.
Sowell was making an essential point, one that the American right would do well to internalize nearly 40 years later. In a column titled “An ‘Epidemic’ of Irresponsibility,” Sowell wrote that “The decline of personal responsibility has been accompanied by a rise in social responsibility by people who had nothing to do with the individual decisions that brought on disaster.” In 1986, a case could be made that Sowell was describing the victim culture of the Left. Not so in 2025.
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