Newsweek

Americans Need to Come to Their Senses: All Five of Them | Opinion

The far left and the far right can seem senseless sometimes. That doesn’t mean they’re stupid. It means they stopped using their five senses to form rational views about politics. Rational views come from seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting.

In court, reports about these five senses are called “evidence.” Fact witnesses tell courts what they saw, heard, felt, smelled, or tasted. Judges and juries apply reason to this evidence to find truth.

This came from the Age of Reason. Our founders loved it. They used evidence-based reason to organize America’s government. The Frenchman, the Marquis de Montesquieu and the Englishman John Locke taught them that government should be bound by a contract with its people and restrained by checks and balances. This thinking was the result of observation and experience.

Science reigned supreme. John Adams called government a science. Benjamin Franklin was a scientist. Thomas Jefferson was an inventor and studied fossils. They ardently believed that the world should be governed by evidence and reason, not blind belief.

But while the 2oth century democracies worshipped this evidence-based science, including the science of governing, these things are slipping away in the 21^st, and we should be worried about it because what’s taking its place looks a lot like the European medievalism that the Age of Reason supplanted.

The average medieval life in Europe was dominated by blind faith, not the use of the five senses. The medieval world had replaced sensible, road-building Romans and deep-thinking Greeks with faith and fear. Despite the undoubted achievements of the era, the life of the average European in the period between 500-1500 was controlled by belief in God and faith in a king. They believed passionately in what they thought was “truth” but reached it without using their own senses. Instead, they were told what to believe by the Church and the Crown. Truth was shrouded in mystery and magic—the powers of the bones of a saint or the magic of a sword wielded by a king. Incantations. Sayings. Ritual assertion of fealty.

Today, the blind-deaf-and-dumb dogma of our far left and right echoes this long-gone lot that preferred to pray disease away rather than wash their hands. Consider the far-left assertion after George Floyd’s murder that the existence of some bad police officers meant that all police officers were bad. It ignored what we could see from most police officers every day, and it led to the “Defund the Police” movement that left us all less safe. It was similarly tone deaf for the left to blame the white descendants of abolitionists and starving 20^th century immigrants for the effects of American slavery. It left many people believing that Democrats opposed white men in politics, culture, and even the movies. It drove them into the arms of the radical right.

Yet the depredations of the radical right—its blindness to reason—its stubborn assertion of lies as truth—and its insistence that objectively bad ideas are good ones—is the worst of the two dangers. Too many of those who voted for President Donald Trump didn’t make good use of their eyes and ears when they considered this man. Instead, their disdain for Democrats led them to blind faith in something called “MAGA,” and that was apparently enough.

Now blind faith is the only thing Trump can hope will sustain him. His administration fights facts with it. In the face of direct evidence to the contrary, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asserted that no war plans were shared on Signal. While she didn’t provide it, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters to take on faith that she had proof that one of two legal immigrants recently arrested was a gang member and the other a terrorist supporter. Trump insists that the judges opposing him are “lunatics” and that attacking our friends and disemboweling the American stock market, is good for us. Trump officials’ screaming and finger pointing is beginning to look like a scene from The Crucible.

Americans should stop taking their politics on faith. “Show me the proof” should take the place of “shout me the denials.” Crowds in the streets seem to be getting that point. May they increase.