Last time, I argued that if liberals still believe in an open society — free, equal, and pluralistic — we must defend reason. It’s the shared “meeting space” that makes the open society possible.
But we must also understand that reason alone isn’t enough.
It’s a classic liberal failing not to understand that.
This too is a legacy of the Enlightenment: The power of the new science was awe-inspiring. So were revolutionary, reason-based ideas about individual rights, freedom, and equality — the ideas at the foundation of liberalism.
Many people, especially liberals, came to assume that reason could explain everything. The world would be comprehended by our minds — our rational minds. To think was to be rational. To be irrational was not to think, but to be “out of your mind.”
It turns out, though, reason can’t explain everything — because some things, including many of the things that are most important to us, can’t be explained. Not unless we shrink them down to a size that can be, and shrink our minds enough to be happy about that.
Love, beauty, and meaning, for example.
And, more prosaically but no less importantly, politics.
Liberals tend to assume that politics is, or should be, rational. How do most liberal politicians campaign? By explaining their excellent policies, of course.
And if that doesn’t work?
They explain harder.
But policies aren’t politics. Politics is the art of persuasion. And policies aren’t persuasive.
What is persuasive is how people feel about policies. Because the medium of persuasion is not reason, but emotion.
This is one of the most important lessons to learn from Donald Trump. With rare exceptions, like his longtime fixation on tariffs, Trump has no policies. Instead, he has impulses, from moment to chaotic moment.
Chief among them is his need to be seen as powerful. Almost everything Trump does is a performance of power.
An unconvincing one, to psychologists who see the terrified, humiliated little boy behind the show.
But it’s convincing enough to his followers. And as Bill Clinton once said, people who are scared would ”rather have someone who is strong and wrong than somebody who is weak and right.“
Trump makes sure his people are scared: of Marxist Democrats, murderous immigrants, and the rest of his gallery of monsters. Then he offers his version of strength.
Why does it succeed? Trump doesn’t know much, but he does know something about how persuasion works.
Consider the hair, the bronzer, the steely look, the gilded furniture. He knows that appearances can matter a lot more than substance. He learned that by failing his way to fame as a pretend mogul on TV.
But if he were so inclined, he might also have learned from it from recent decades of research in psychology and neuroscience.
That research overturns the assumption that thought is essentially rational: We have non-rational emotions, drives, instincts, and habits, of course, but in a sane, educated adult, they’re subservient to reason.
Liberalism was founded on that assumption, and many liberals hold it still.
To them, it seems obvious that politics should be a reasoned debate about policies. In the end, evidence and logic should prevail.
That’s not necessarily what happens.
In 2005, a young Princeton psychologist named Alexander Todorov decided to test the power of faces in politics.
In an experiment he designed with his assistant Janine Willis, people were shown photos of unfamiliar Senate candidates from elections in other states. They were then asked to assess the politicians based on no other information.
“Who looks more honest?” “Who looks more competent?”
The subjects’ judgments were compared to the results of the elections.
Todorov and Willis were astounded at what they found.
Just by taking a brief look at the candidates’ faces, the subjects had chosen the winners of the elections, about 70 percent of the time.
Willis suggested they measure how brief that look could be. They ran a new experiment in which subjects saw candidate photos for either one second, a half second, or just a tenth of a second – barely time to know they’d seen a face at all.
It didn’t make a difference. A tenth of a second was enough.
“If given more time, people’s fundamental judgment about faces did not change,” Todorov reported. “Observers simply became more confident in their judgments as the duration lengthened.”
Results this dramatic are often ephemeral. After an initial splash of excitement, they dissolve under scrutiny.
That wasn’t the case here. Other scientists replicated Todorov and Willis’ results, even under tighter conditions. In one variant of the experiment, Swiss children chose the winners of elections in France, again with about 70 percent accuracy. Those elections had been run before some of the children were born.
So… should we stop bothering with election campaigns? Just show voters some pictures and be done with it? After all, if faces foretell results seven times out of ten, maybe the candidates’ full bodies would get us all the way there.
Or maybe not. In real elections, other factors do play a role. Think of party affiliation, or strongly held beliefs about single issues, like guns or abortion.
But what many of the most significant factors have in common is that they have little to do with rational thought.
That’s unfortunate for liberals, who have become rational to a fault, to their great political cost.
If we filter all our experience, of the world, of other people, and of ourselves, through rationality, we become separated from experience, as if we’re not living life, but observing it with scientific instruments.
We become alienated.
It’s a condition familiar to anyone who’s had a modern, reason-based education, especially in the humanities. It has come to define life within the modern, post-Enlightenment worldview.
And as liberals have become ever more educated, it has come to define them. Thanks to the postwar education boom, more and more of them have gone to college.
Meanwhile they have become alien, and alienating, to more and more voters.
Liberals often puzzle over this. Why do we struggle to connect with voters, including voters who used to support us? As I write, the Democratic Party is engaged in yet another project of study and analysis, trying to identify the problem.
I’d argue that Democrats’ addiction to study and analysis is the problem.
It’s what aliens do: try to figure out these strange locals, in this case with polls, focus groups, and delegations to bars, barbershops, and taquerias. But to figure out is not to connect. The harder you try, the more you seem, and feel, like what you are: a stranger. Alienated.
More on this next time, including glimpses of the way home.
Image: Hourglass Nebula around a Dying Star, via Hubble Space Telescope, NASA, ESA, Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team
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