It has been over a half-century since the heralded British political theorist Michael Oakeshott published his most acclaimed work, Rationalism in Politics. Oakeshott put forward the thesis that since the 18th century the culture and politics of the West have come to operate under the sway of a rational mode of thinking, one in which people think of themselves as the “enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional.” Not old parchments or myth or the supposed wisdom of ancestors supplies the foundation of rule, but a modern understanding of reason. To Oakeshott, this modern view of reason was unreasonable, promoting an ideological approach to the political world rather than a sensible immersion in a nation’s own practices. Reason’s growing authority was nevertheless the cardinal fact of our age.
At the forefront in embracing reason were the Americans, who drew their thinking from the realm of philosophy in the form of natural rights and who, perhaps for the first time, brought theory openly into the political realm as the basis of a new nation. None of this meant, however, that the rise of reason would go unchallenged. In America, after the acceptance of the Declaration, the authors of The Federalist were already worried during the debate over ratifying the Constitution about “passions and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.” In the Jacksonian era, observers like Alexis de Tocqueville charged that the new mass presidential campaigns brought rabble-rousing and demagogy into presidential politics and encouraged an incumbent to “prostrate himself before the majority and . . . run to meet its caprices.”
All of the new communications technologies that came along were greeted with expectations that they would boost rational discussion, only to be subsequently condemned for corrupting the public mind. Newspapers, which Thomas Jefferson initially lauded and helped to fund, came eventually under his attack: “the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors.”
Film entered the scene, enabling average Americans for the first time to see their leaders, but this medium, as its use during World War I showed, could be an instrument of mass government propaganda. Electronic media followed, first radio and then television. TV allowed people to see and hear their leaders in real time, which promised to favor reasonable dialogue. Yet it produced three network news giants that pompously celebrated themselves as representatives of an objective “fourth estate,” which often subtly supported one side.
In our day we have experienced the rise of social media, which is rewriting every aspect of political communications. One of its forms, Twitter, now seems to account for half of every news program, with experienced reporters reading out the day’s rantings, insults, rumors, and boasts. The place of this medium in presidential communication, one already forgets, began only recently. At 8:38 a.m. on May 15, 2015, Barack Obama surprised internauts with the first presidential tweet, replete with the usual overuse of the exclamation point: “Hello, Twitter! It’s Barack. Really!” The White House later promised that @POTUS would afford Barack a “new way to engage directly with the American people, with tweets coming exclusively from him.” Here was another promise of more intelligent dialogue.
Up perhaps to very end, reason was arguably still strengthening its claim over political life. For all of the problems that were encountered, more and more real information was still being made available, at times perhaps too much for people to digest. Americans came to rely on intellectual commentators who helped served as gatekeepers to the political world. These authorities disagreed and quarreled, but they usually made an effort to persuade those who were not on their side.
We have now entered a new universe. Looking back, some may detect the turning point in the 2008 presidential campaign, when panting acolytes of Barack Obama swooned before his phantasmagoric paeans to “hope and change” uttered in front of faux Greek columns. People were asked to accept this display, just as they were soon told to swallow the absurdity of the new president’s Nobel Peace Prize. Had the modern democratic world lost its connection to reason?
Yet nothing prepared the scene for the revolutionary shift that began in the last presidential campaign. Rationalism was shown the door, as Donald Trump turned the Republican presidential primary contest into a food fight. “Reasonable” dialogue has since completely collapsed, with Democrats now joining in to make reciprocal charges against the president. Every insult imaginable has been deployed, from the president’s accusations of treason against those who will not applaud him to his opponents’ charge of mental incompetence. Politics of this kind has become the new normal.
This situation has brought the decline of rationalism as the commonly accepted authority in our society. The end of rationalism is best seen not in the expression of strongly conflicting views but in the abandonment of the idea that one’s opponents can ever be persuaded by a rational argument. The effort would be futile. Pick up a newspaper, and it is becoming clearer by the day that more and more of our commenters have abandoned even the pretense of addressing a general readership. They speak only to those who share their views, as if this is now their accepted function.
It is a mistake, however, to think that this new stage means that people have lost all capacity to act, after a fashion, in a rational way. The two sides today are rational for themselves even as they have lost all faith in the authority of reason in society at large.
Trump supporters, contrary to what most of their opponents believe, are by and large not the dupes of the president’s hyperboles, untruths, and extravagances. Most of them have one or two big reasons for backing Trump, which may be their economic plight, their opposition to political correctness, or their opposition to illegal immigration. As for everything else Trump says and does, many ignore these matters and go about their business; some approve of his behavior as a fighter willing to take on the enemy, or see it as form of entertainment, in the fashion of a professional wrestler who provokes and taunts his foes; and, finally, others, while wishing that he would act more presidential, are not yet willing for this reason to jump ship.
Trump opponents who total up each and every instance of outlandish behavior miss the logic of his support. Yet they are likewise in their own way acting rationally. They despise him to the core and then some, as his provocations against them multiply. Their objective is to get him out and meanwhile to resist everything he does. Accepting him as president is by now an impossibility. With this in mind, they often distort facts, exaggerate, and present his deeds and words in the darkest light possible.
Who are those today who cling stubbornly to the authority of reason? Very few, surprisingly, come from among Democrats. Satisfied in their self-righteousness and convinced of their moral rectitude, Democratic commentators and politicians, joined by some ex-Republicans, spend much of their time acting as scorekeepers, castigating those who support Trump, praising those who take stands against him, and withholding judgment of those who have not come along far enough but may still do so. Because their candidate was defeated in the last election, Democrats have the luxury of not having to answer for how much illegality and corruption they would be willing to countenance in a leader. This leaves a smaller group of Republicans and ex-Republicans who are struggling to defend reason in a world where few care genuinely about it. These lonely souls are left to wander at the edge of the political scene, hoping their exile will last not forty years but four.
James W. Ceaser is professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
