A reader sends this link to this New Republic article by Jonathan Chait, entitled <a href=”http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-a8a0-945d1deb420b”>The Dead Left which illustrates the extreme hedgehog. Chait reviews a new book by Naomi Klein who began with the thesis that Capitalism was evil. After 9/11 she came to the conclusion that Capitalism was even more evil. Chait writes:

And then came September 11. … But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. “I felt it emotionally,” she told The New York Times, “before I understood it factually.” Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was–guess what?–part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly. The left-wing labor economist Kim Phillips-Fein has written admiringly about Klein’s role in seamlessly transforming the anti-globalization movement into the anti-imperialist movement …

It’s an article of faith among some conservatives that every liberal once mugged or beset by the consequences of bad judgements experiences a kind of conversion. But not necessarily with a hedgehog, because misfortune only brings confirmation that the Man is out to Get Them. Some people’s belief system cannot be falsified by experience. This implies that a certain hard core of fanatics exist within any movement, whether on the left or the right. That’s a pretty worrisome thought.