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“The Uneducated Voted for Trump”
A Brief Case for & against Reason in Politics
Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, Modi, Erdogan, Le Pen, and so many other figures are polluting our politics. Most of these politicians have used arguments that seem blatantly flawed to a lot of us, especially those of us who have a history in post-secondary.
And so the growing divide between the elite and populace grows.
Populism is on the rise because of this divide. And there have been many op-eds and blog posts written about the horrors of the rural vote.
I won’t trouble you with that here. But I will stress that we have long overestimated our collective capability to reason impartially and well.
I don’t believe that the “peasants” are the only ones capable of agreeing with bad arguments. Quite the opposite. We’re all guilty of that. And we should recognize the extent to which we are prone to agree with what are blatantly misleading claims in retrospect.
We think of ourselves as purely rational thinkers when we frequently replace one logical fallacy for the next. When it comes to our feelings of moral superiority, for example, one might think that those who think about these issues the most are certainly the more moral ones.
