The West Still Confuses Weakness with Virtue

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Years ago, Michael Prell gave a name to one of the West's most dangerous moral reflexes: underdogma. He saw that Americans, and Westerners more broadly, often treat the weaker party as morally superior simply because it is weaker, while treating the stronger party as morally suspect simply because it is stronger.

He was right. But the problem has become deeper than a political habit or a sentimental preference for the little guy. It has hardened into a cognitive shortcut. I have come to think of it as the underdog heuristic: the tendency to convert perceived weakness into innocence and perceived strength into guilt before the evidence has even been examined.

A heuristic is a mental shortcut. It saves time. It can also distort judgment. In this case, the shortcut works like this: less power equals more virtue; more power equals more blame. The weaker side is presumed to be the victim. The stronger side is presumed to be the aggressor. Conduct becomes secondary. Position on the power axis becomes the moral fact.

That is not compassion. Compassion says, "I see your suffering." The underdog heuristic says, "Your suffering makes you right." Those are not the same thing.

The difference matters because the world contains many kinds of underdogs. Some are genuinely innocent. Some are merely weaker than their enemies. Some are weak and vicious at the same time. There is such a thing as an evil underdog. A group can be outmatched militarily and still choose murder, rape, hostage-taking, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. Weakness does not confer virtue. Suffering does not confer wisdom. Powerlessness does not excuse evil.

October 7 should have made this obvious.

Hamas did not hide what it was doing. Its operatives crossed into Israel, murdered civilians, took hostages, filmed atrocities, and celebrated their work. The victims were not abstractions. They were families, children, elderly people, young people at a music festival, and Jews murdered because they were Jews.

And yet, within hours, parts of the Western intelligentsia began the work of moral restoration. The massacre was acknowledged, then "contextualized." It became a response to "occupation," a desperate act of "resistance," one more episode in a "cycle of violence." The point was not to deny that Hamas had killed. The point was to preserve Hamas's place in the victim category.

That is the underdog heuristic at work. Once "Palestinians" (I use quotation marks to distinguish the modern political identity claim from the older Mandate-era geographic usage) are assigned the role of underdog, their conduct becomes difficult for many Western observers to judge honestly. The stronger party, Israel, is scrutinized through the language of power. The weaker party, even when governed or represented by terrorist movements, is scrutinized through the language of grievance.

The same moral shortcut explains why slogans such as "from the river to the sea" are treated by many educated people as liberation poetry rather than as an eliminationist territorial demand. It explains why a keffiyeh can function as a moral credential on a college campus even when the person wearing it knows little about the history of the conflict. It explains why casualty numbers supplied through Hamas-linked institutions are treated as if they came from neutral accountants rather than from a regime that uses civilians both physically and statistically.

The heuristic does not ask, "What did they do?" It asks, "Who appears weaker?" Once that question is answered, the rest of the moral script writes itself.

This is especially prominent on the Left, not because conservatives are immune to victimhood politics, but because the Left has made underdog-championing part of its moral architecture. Marxism organized moral judgment around the oppressed class. Postcolonial theory elevated the colonized as presumptively righteous. Intersectionality turned disadvantage into a ranking system of moral authority. The categories changed, but the rule remained: the weaker position is the morally favored position.

That framework has consequences. It encourages journalists to contextualize violence by perceived underdogs while condemning violence by perceived overdogs. It encourages academics to study the grievances of terrorists more readily than their choices. It encourages diplomats to pressure the stronger party for concessions while asking less of the weaker party's conduct, institutions, education, and incitement.

Worse, it rewards the performance of victimhood. Movements learn quickly that appearing weak can produce moral leverage. They learn that images of suffering travel faster than evidence, that slogans beat arguments, and that Western guilt can be converted into political capital. The result is not justice. It is a moral marketplace in which victimhood becomes currency.

The antidote is not cruelty. It is judgment.

A decent society should care about suffering. It should protect the vulnerable. It should restrain power when power is abused. But it should not mistake suffering for righteousness, nor power for guilt. The proper question is behavioral: what did the actor do?

Did it target civilians? Did it protect civilians? Did it teach its children to hate? Did it reward murder? Did it accept compromise? Did it reform after failure? Did it investigate wrongdoing by its own side? Did it celebrate atrocities?

These questions are not complicated, but they are clarifying. They restore agency to actors whom the underdog heuristic reduces to symptoms. They also restore moral responsibility to observers, who too often prefer the feeling of righteousness to the work of judgment.

The conflict between Israel and the "Palestinians" is the clearest case, but it is not the only one. The same reflex appears in debates over policing, crime, immigration, capitalism, and American power. The strong are presumed suspect; the weak are presumed morally privileged. That shortcut flatters the conscience, but it corrupts perception.

My father used to say, "I root for the underdog." It was one of his most humane instincts, and in ordinary life it often served him well. But politics and war are not ballgames. A moral reflex that works at the dinner table can become disastrous when applied to terrorism, statecraft, and civilizational conflict.

Prell named the disease early. The West has spent the years since proving how advanced it has become.

The task now is not to stop caring about the weak. It is to stop worshiping weakness. The moral worth of a person, movement, or nation is not determined by how little power it appears to possess. It is determined by what it does with whatever power it has.

Weakness is not virtue. Strength is not guilt. And until the West relearns that distinction, it will continue to reward the very behaviors it claims to oppose.

David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception.