“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed. And for this trouble there is no remedy.” (Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 1967).
The energy behind Trumpism comes largely from anger at experts and educated elites, especially in the government ‘deep state.’ The intellectual argument rests on questionable claims that our founding principles are incompatible with modern science, and that progressivism and liberalism, which are based in part on that science, are threats to American values. If these views are not understood and countered we will be unable to regain the shared reality needed to sustain a free society.
Now that the Trump presidency is over, we must try to sort through the rubble. One of its most dangerous and frequently noted legacies is the damage to our shared understanding of reality. Even before Trump we were having bitter fights about science and the role of experts in politics and policy. Populists and conservatives had lined up against scientific findings like global warming, the need for childhood vaccinations, and other similar exercises in truth denial. Right-wing media had built up an alternative reality that boosted not only science skepticism but a general skepticism towards any common account of the world.
Trump doubled down on these trends. His budget drastically cut government funding for scientific research. He appointed unqualified people to positions requiring real expertise, often people who were openly opposed to science and scientifically-based policy. He favored—and was often directed by—Fox News and other supportive media outlets, while telling frequent lies. For those who disagreed, whether scientists or journalists, Trumpists openly aimed not just at refutation but at delegitimization and destruction.
The Supposed Progressive Threat
Trump and his supporters justified this as a push to end the supposed capture of government by “experts” and professionals. Steve Bannon (pardoned by Trump on his way out the door) early on said the goal was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”[1] Regulations promulgated by “unelected bureaucrats” were a major target (never mind that most of these have been mandated by Congress), but the disagreement went deeper.
- Many of the conservative thinkers who have banded together behind Trump, led by the Straussians writing for the Claremont Review, demonize Woodrow Wilson as the progressive arch-enemy who symbolizes what has gone wrong with America.[2] Wilson was an academic and a political scientist—a former President of the American Political Science Association—who thought good decisions should be informed by professional experts drawing on the latest scientific research.
- In Trump’s last days his administration released a report from the 1776 Commission, an analysis of American history by a group that didn’t include any actual historians, but did include Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review, along with the President of Hillsdale College and similar ideologues. In it the Progressive era, generally thought of as a period of good government reforms and much-needed limitations on big business, is astonishingly singled out as a threat to democracy on a par with slavery and fascism.[3]
According to Kesler and his ilk, “The Progressives sought to overthrow the Constitution in all but name.” The essence of their criticism is that Progressives, under the influence of modern science, thought human beings were shaped in important ways by outside forces and ‘society.’ This, according to the 1776 Commission, is incompatible with believing in the ‘true and eternal’ principles of the Declaration, especially that all men are endowed with natural rights. The Commission argues strongly for the individualist view of human nature supposedly embodied in the Declaration and Constitution, that people are independent actors and the sole task of government is to protect individual rights. [4]
The Progressive view indeed draws on science in ways that underscore human weaknesses and the limits of ‘rugged individualism.’ Over time the biological and social sciences have shown the many ways individuals are shaped by complex internal drives, by how we are raised and educated, by prejudices and biases associated with race and gender, by poverty and inequality, and a myriad of other factors outside our individual control.
This understanding suggests that if we want autonomous, self-directed, free human beings, the kind of people who will make good democratic citizens, we must work to create them. We must not leave this to chance but must do our best to bring about the right social conditions.
Among other things, we need a government that makes sure certain essential goods are widely available, beyond the minimal goods—national defense and law and order—of the ‘watchman state’ endorsed by the 1776 Commission. Government must address poverty, discrimination, and ignorance. In particular it must protect citizens from oppression by unscrupulous private interests. The Progressive movement arose largely in response to the immense wealth and power of modern industry and the threat it posed to democratic government, via its ability to corrupt the political process, and its exploitation of individual workers.
This view of an active government, drawing on experts and research to create the conditions for freedom and buffer individuals from dominating institutions, is anathema to conservatives who hold to the individualist myth supposedly enshrined in our founding documents. Hence their view that there can be no compromise, no splitting the difference, with progressives (or liberals, since they are the same thing). It is war to the death.
There can in fact be tension between democracy and science, or democracy and reason. We are not aware of this in large part because our own democracy was viewed by its creators as based in reason and the Enlightenment. They supported not only the natural sciences but also what they saw as new, scientific discoveries in politics, as Hamilton tells us in Federalist #9: “The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients.” Hamilton is thinking of ideas like separation of powers, bicameralism, and judicial review.
The difficulty, however, is that the conclusions of science or of reason are not democratic. They don’t depend on popular support or whether a majority agrees or disagrees; Galileo concluded that the earth circled the sun, and was properly indifferent to what everyone else thought at the time. Many thinkers both before and after the American Revolution believed that a genuine science of politics based on irrefutable conclusions about individual and group behavior would allow us eventually to create the best human society, and it would not be a democracy.
Nineteenth-century positivists, scientific materialists like Marx, and Social Darwinists in the early 20th century all held to this belief. It is this danger that the critics of Woodrow Wilson believe modern liberalism is guilty of propagating. Are they right?
Arguments for Democracy
The argument for democracy largely rests on judgments about our intellectual capacities. Critics of democracy have generally argued that some people are more intelligent, and more able to make good decisions about public affairs, than others. From Plato to Marx, this has been the position of thinkers convinced there is a rational, scientific understanding of politics available only to a few. These people should rule.
Democrats can counter with two arguments. First, they can question whether this sort of scientific understanding is possible. Human affairs are a realm of irreducible uncertainty and unpredictability; a conclusive science of human affairs is not achievable. If things are so complicated and so full of complex interactions that no human being can fully unravel the lines of causality, or predict the outcomes of what we do and don’t do, then in some fundamental sense we are all equal. We are all equally limited. There is no definitive science of mankind that can substitute for our flawed, partial, human judgments.
Second, there is good reason to think that joint judgments that get the benefit of many individuals contributing their experiences and views, and that guarantee the decision will be made with an eye to the well-being of the many, will be better and fairer than the judgments of one Great Man, no matter how smart. Aristotle—certainly no believer in human equality—in the Politics makes this argument to explain why democracy is superior to oligarchy. Democracy’s superiority rests on the reality that human beings are cooperative ‘political animals’ and not isolated individuals. (Aristotle, Politics, Book III).
Freedom as Unconstrained Will
Does this mean the populist argument wins? To be constrained by science and the judgments of experts is an unacceptable restriction on our freedom. This is, in essence, the Bannon argument: If freedom and reason are opposed, the hell with reason.
In this construct freedom is essentially an act of will, and the will is at its purest if it rejects any bounds, including reason. Bannon as we can read is a great admirer of “The Triumph of the Will,” Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic paean to Hitler.[5] He also calls himself a Leninist, and Leninism is basically Marxism that denies the scientific side of Marx; Lenin claimed the Revolution could happen without waiting for History to work its magic, without the necessary growth of an industrial proletariat—all it needs are people who will it to happen. Leninism, like Naziism, is closer to Nietzsche than to Marx.
Bannon’s instincts here are closely linked to some major trends in modern thought, originally intended to counter entrenched social power but over time expanded to call into question all claims to objectivity. So-called “critical theory” originated on the Left with European thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, who argued that modern science and other Enlightenment ideas were essentially tools for ruling elites to exercise power and oppress the lower classes. Their ideas have migrated to the right as angry partisans have found them a convenient way to call into question the validity of their opponents, who can easily be labeled as ‘fake news.’’
- Alt-right white supremacists and woke social justice warriors disagree on almost everything, but agree in dismissing factual or logical claims they don’t like as ‘motivated speech’ that rests on prior biases or hidden agendas, not on verifiable truth.
- One of Trump’s most influential internet-troll supporters, Mike Cernovich, said in a New Yorker interview in 2016: “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?”
Ultimately, in this worldview, there are no truths. There is only power, the power to insist that your version of reality is correct. It turns out that throwing science and reason over the side to save freedom leads to tyranny rather than any kind of freedom that most of us would recognize.
In this light we can see that freedom requires some constraint on the will. Something has to buffer human beings from assaults on their autonomy, from a Big Brother who wants you to agree that 2+2=5, or a President who wants you to believe that the election he lost was rigged. One might say that freedom requires a ‘ground’ that is not free, that just is.
As Hannah Arendt concludes in her essay “Truth and Politics”: “What I meant to show here is that this whole sphere [the political] its greatness notwithstanding, is limited—that it does not encompass the whole of man’s and the world’s existence. It is limited by those things which men cannot change at will. And it is only by respecting its own borders that this realm, where we are free to act and to change, can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises. Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.” The preservation of a functioning political sphere requires non-political work by philosophers, scientists, historians, journalists and others dedicated to facts and truth.
We are forced to conclude that freedom, like science, may be threatened by radical individualism, because the egalitarian principle, unchecked, leads to truth itself becoming subject to the flux of popular opinion. As Susan Jacoby says in her 2008 book, The Age of American Unreason, “The real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon, fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.” This is, in my view, the inevitable outcome of the individualist ideology promoted by the 1776 Commission. It has become the populist air now breathed by millions of Americans who think Alex Jones is more reliable than the New York Times.
Why Americans Have Been Complacent
It is vital therefore that defenders of democracy find ways to constrain this “credo of tolerance.” Unfortunately, many Americans accept common arguments that make them complacent about the dangers of today’s information environment and lead them to mistakenly believe that each of us can on our own sort through competing claims to truth.
Lies Don’t Last. One is that untruths are self-refuting. A conviction or theory at odds with reality will eventually collapse in the face of new evidence. Therefore we don’t need to get too worked up about lies having the last say—kill them all, and let God sort them out.
This is, however, not always a good guide to action. Sometimes mistakes and lies have to be refuted quickly, without waiting for the roof to collapse.
- It’s true that climate denial will eventually be untenable. The planet will be warmer, the ice will melt, the seas will rise, the forests will burn. But by the time the last denier has been converted, it may be some satisfaction to say “I told you so!”, but it will be too late for mankind.
- After the 2008 financial collapse even Alan Greenspan admitted that his faith in unregulated markets had been misplaced. Better to have heeded the many refutations of market fundamentalism before millions lost their homes.
Today is Different. A second bad argument is that our problems today with technology and social media are brand new. If you think Facebook and Twitter are radically different from anything before in human experience, then once we wrestle them to the ground we solve the problem.
But powerful people and interests have been successfully distorting reality, on a grand scale, since…forever. To take just some recent examples: King Leopold of Belgium convinced much of the world in the late 19th century he was helping the Congolese people, when actually he was enslaving and massacring them. William Randolph Hearst and the yellow press seized on the sinking of the Maine—almost certainly the result of an accident, not Spanish attack—to drive the US into war with Spain. The “Lost Cause” fantasy of kindly masters and happy slaves was invented by Southerners but then spread to much of the country, meaning for a hundred years many Americans lived (and many still live) with a fundamentally false understanding of their history. Communists and fascists perfected Big Lies, including infamous manipulations of film and photos, that fooled millions, not just in their own countries but beyond. McCarthyism. Big Tobacco and cancer. Big Oil and climate.
Each of these used new media and technology—mass circulation newspapers, radio, television—that were hailed at their birth as certain to promote truth and freedom. They found ways to use these tools in the service of the same old underlying goals: money, power, fame. Today, old wine is again being poured into new bottles. We most certainly need to rein in modern social media. But new communication tools will inevitably arise that face us with the same problems.
Competition Solves Everything. A third argument is that truth will emerge from the most intense possible competition. Americans have great faith that competition produces the best results. This is the basis for our democratic politics, our scientific advances, and our free for all journalism. The foundation is equal access to every opinion and truth claim. As Jefferson wrote, “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”[6] Or as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1919, “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
Competition is central to our view of science; for a claim about the world to be ‘scientific,’ we expect that it will have been subject to rigorous criticism by its ‘competitors,’ i.e. by proponents of alternative or rival claims. It will have been published in elite peer-reviewed journals where experts will go over every aspect with a fine-toothed comb. For the most part we can’t evaluate scientific claims ourselves, but we can evaluate whether the competitive process has been adhered to.
However, ensuring genuine competition is extremely difficult. Free market advocates tend to assume the conditions for competition, including “perfect information,” in explaining how competition ensures the optimal allocation of resources. But imperfect, partial, and misleading information is the rule, not the exception, in most spheres of life. The benefits of competition do not naturally arise in the absence of carefully constructed rules and institutions; they require thoughtful and active interventions to prevent monopolies and other distortions.
Institutional Failures
In this paradigm, it is essential for these gatekeepers to operate properly and without bias or manipulation. When doubt arises that this is true, or even possible, it can devastate faith in outcomes. Today we have a double-barreled problem. Many of the key institutions we look to for objectivity have shortcomings that need urgent addressing. These shortcomings give ammunition to those who want to cast doubt on judgments they believe are not in their interests.
- Elections, for instance, are primarily a cognitive exercise, a carefully constructed mechanism for counting preferences. Unfortunately there is ample reason to think that in the US this process is corrupted by money, special interests, gerrymandering, and voter suppression. This gives credence to arguments that election results, and laws passed by those elected, do not reflect popular opinion.
- Careful studies of the scientific process show some fields are riddled with shoddiness and personal biases. Experimental results often cannot be replicated.[7] Scientists are human and can try to cut corners or manipulate evidence to get published and enhance their own reputations. This gives credence to those who want to cast doubt on specific scientific findings, such as human-caused global warming, or hawk unfounded theories about vaccines or the benefits of trickle-down economics.
- Mainstream reporters and news organizations have often failed to recognize the ways their prejudices, educational backgrounds, and the economic needs of their platforms shape what stories they cover and how they cover them. Powerful interests, mostly on the right, have seized on these shortcomings to justify explicitly one-sided ‘news’ coverage and to discredit the very idea of an impartial press.
If we refuse to set limits on media on the grounds that we are better off giving everyone an equal right to express themselves, we may believe we are strengthening individual and minority views, but what we are often doing is leaving people prey to the loudest, most authoritative voice. Some voices are inevitably more equal than others, often due to having the money or power to influence—or own—major media. And the platforms themselves, like talk radio and Facebook, are far from neutral; as we are now all too aware, they are designed to arouse strong emotions and reinforce prejudices to keep users engaged and sell more advertising.
The threat that populist demagogues and opinion echo-chambers pose is that only the strongest souls can cling to something true if it is regularly denied by their neighbors, their leaders, and key media. If the majority are taught and bullied to affirm out loud that Jews are subhuman, or the socialist motherland is a worker’s paradise, or illegal immigrants are all murderers and rapists, most will eventually succumb.
What We Can Do
Are there remedies? Yes, if we accept the Progressive insight that a healthy democracy requires active interventions, backed by science and research, to create the conditions for individuals and communities to flourish. Many, though not all of these, must come from government.
A vital check is placing a high value on sources of truth or accepted knowledge that everyone can agree on—Hannah Arendt’s “ground” and “sky.” Wide acceptance that the work of scientists and expert professionals is valid is necessary to prevent democracy from dissolving every judgment in Susan Jacoby’s acid bath of “junk thought.”
- Our schools and curriculum designers have a central role to play here. Unfortunately many Americans have only the vaguest notion how science works, or the methods that experts in different fields use to sift fact from fiction, or assign probabilities to their judgments.[8] Modern science does not teach a sterile determinism but incorporates at its heart uncertainty and unpredictability. These must be essential elements of classroom education beginning in the early years. Perhaps a post-DeVos Education Secretary could take this on.
- Higher education is also key. A dangerous line of thinking on the left asserts that all judgments are nothing but expressions of power relations determined by class or race or gender. While there is plenty of room for debate about how ‘truth’ is determined, a simplistic version of this argument has become an unexamined article of faith in many parts of academia. From there it has migrated into the larger culture. It needs to be vigorously challenged in our colleges and universities
We must do more to fix the shortcomings of our gatekeeper institutions. Major political reforms are needed to ensure elections reflect more accurately the real preferences of the majority rather than those with the largest checkbooks. Scientists must redouble their adherence to high standards for publication and replication of results, and need to do a better job of inserting their voices into public debates.
Perhaps the most urgent task is to make sure the media are not monopolized by a few owners, that a variety of views are heard, and that major platforms meet minimum standards of accuracy.
- This could mean reinstating a new version of the Fairness Doctrine, abandoned in 1987 under the Reagan Administration in the name of free speech. This is needed because American audiences today do not regularly encounter a range of opinions that engage with one another. Instead, they self-select—and are powerfully manipulated to select—only one set of views. Competition has no chance to take effect.
- Another option would be supporting public media, not only at the national but the state and local levels, where journalism has been fading for decades. We should make PBS the equivalent of Great Britain’s BBC, a trusted powerhouse with global reach. [9]
Journalism is one of many areas of our complex modern life where hidden manipulation can lead people to act against their own interests. Mortgage bankers selling loans to unqualified buyers, politicians advocating tax cuts that benefit the rich, drug companies pushing addictive pain pills: all these require government intervention by publicly accountable institutions to prevent lies and deception. These interventions, the legacy of the Progressive movement, focus on protecting citizens from outside powers.
Cultivating Democratic Humility
We must also avoid unrealistic expectations. If we put our institutions on pedestals, they are destined to fall. Citizens who are taught that democratic elections are pure and unstained expressions of the popular will can be devastated when they discover “it ain’t so.” If you believe science exists in a hallowed universe separate from other pedestrian human activities, you will be baffled by its uncertainties and mistakes. (We saw this play out recently in arguments about wearing masks to fight the spread of COVID-19, where the initial, and erroneous, message from the CDC that masks were not effective was used to justify rejecting all subsequent advice). Journalists aren’t perfect and even the most scrupulous reporters will get things wrong in the heat of the moment. In every case an ideal struggles with a messy, imperfect reality.
Jefferson hoped that a future democracy with the freest possible access to every opinion would be able to agree on “reason and truth.” But one of the things ‘reason and truth’ teach is that there are limits to reason and truth. All of our methods and institutions are imperfect; chance, uncertainty, unpredictability, and irrationality are part of the human condition.
This is frustrating but also liberating. Though we crave certainty, it is uncertainty that leaves room for freedom and makes democracy valuable. If a perfect science of human affairs was achievable, freedom would vanish and we could hand governance over to a small class of experts, or a bank of computers. Instead we are forced to take into account various perspectives, reflecting differences in experience, natural endowments, class, gender, race, the whole caboodle—there is no rational basis for dismissing any of them.
Paradoxically, the science and expertise that frightens the 1776 Commission teaches us that no rigid science of humanity is in sight. Modern biology, the social sciences, complexity theory: all show human behavior is the result of astonishing combinations of multiple interacting systems.
Today we are rightly fearful that advances in computers and access to Big Data will allow for reliable prediction, and manipulation, of individuals and groups. But while with one hand science seems to squeeze free will and individuality out of the picture, with its other hand it seems to guarantee that a complete understanding of complex social systems, along with the power to predict and control, is impossible.
- According to a recent description from an expert in complexity studies: “Complexity Theory has established the limits of Classic Science…showing the limits of our capacity to predict and control events. Dissipative structures have shown the creative role of time. Instability, emergence, surprise, unpredictability are the rule rather than the exception …”[10]
- A recent study by computer scientists of a simple social system finds that “even with unlimited data predictive performance would be bounded well below deterministic accuracy” and concludes that “realistic bounds on predictive accuracy are not dissimilar from those we have obtained empirically, and that such bounds for other complex social systems for which data is more difficult to obtain are likely even lower.”[11]
This means that ultimately decisions about what to do should not be delegated to experts but are best made through a democratic process. Our task is to invent ways to bring multiple perspectives together and have them interact constructively.[12]
- Expanding on Aristotle’s insight, modern advocates of “deliberative democracy” argue for processes where citizens engage in reasonable discussion, exchanging “reasons that are mutually acceptable and generally accessible, with the aim of reaching conclusions that are binding in the present on all citizens but open to challenge in the future.”[13]
- Citizen’s assemblies have been used successfully in Ireland and Scotland to deal with sensitive topics like abortion. [14]
On the other hand, the fact we cannot vanquish uncertainty cannot be an excuse for throwing learning and expertise over the side. Lack of perfection doesn’t mean that every claim about reality is as good as any other. No one thinks their random next door neighbor is as good as anyone else at removing their gall bladder. Expertise is needed to advise citizens and their representatives, with agreed procedures that require it be taken into account.
Uncertainty cannot be eliminated but can be bounded: as statisticians admonish us, “update your priors!”[15] Well-constructed methods for determining and combining a wide range of knowledge and opinion are available and do, for the most part, produce better—not perfect, but better—judgments.
Acknowledging this is to recognize that we live in an ambiguous world, where we know some things but not everything. Perhaps the central democratic virtue is humility. We are neither beasts nor gods.
Building on the Progressive Legacy
The Progressive movement, like all complex movements, was imperfect. Some of its advocates were indeed paternalistic believers in the ‘rule of experts.’ But at its heart it aimed at protecting individual citizens against domination by undemocratic forces, especially Big Business but also corrupt political machines. In its New Deal and Great Society manifestations, Progressivism took aim at poverty, hunger, racism, unemployment, and lack of education, in order to keep citizens from being diminished and manipulated. These efforts relied on research and expertise, in and out of government, to demonstrate the existence of inequities and guide pragmatic responses.
The 1776 Report deplores the growth of government, supposedly at the expense of the Founders’ understanding of individual liberty. But it is Madison who tells us, in Federalist 10, that human beings, equal in political rights, are not equal in their ability to acquire property, that this gives rise to competing interests, above all the rich and the poor, and that “The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation.” It is government that must ensure inequalities in property and wealth—so often the result of differential treatment according to race or ethnicity or gender–do not mean inequality in rights and in the ability to participate in public life as citizens on an equal footing.
Reactionary interests in the US look nostalgically back on a pre-Progressive past when legislators and courts reliably deferred to business, often basing their arguments, as in the infamous 1905 Lochner Supreme Court decision, on a narrow understanding of property rights without regard for discrepancies in power between individuals and employers.[16] Despite the hand-wringing of the 1776 Report, Progressivism has by no means vanquished the power of wealthy elites, who continue to wrap themselves in self-serving appeals to Constitutional principles, like the ‘free speech’ argument used in Citizen’s United to give corporations the right to ‘speak’—meaning, to give money to politicians, used largely to shape public opinion.
Madisonian conflict between haves and have-nots rages in today’s America, as armies of business lobbyists in Washington and the states propagate their versions of truth, and a tiny fraction of the electorate is allowed to amass great wealth and use it to offset the will of the people. A large and sophisticated bureaucracy, supported by informed citizens, is needed to stand up to these forces.
The foundations of democratic politics and a pluralistic society are epistemological as well as moral and pragmatic. We must be conscious of them and protect them, or we will disintegrate into warring tribes with no hope of recovery.
[1] “Bannon vows a daily fight for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state,” Washington Post, February 23 2017; https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-wh-strategist-vows-a-daily-fight-for-deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state/2017/02/23/03f6b8da-f9ea-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html
[2] “The Progressive Revolt Against the Founding,” Claremont Institute; https://www.claremont.org/featured/the-progressive-revolt-against-the-founding/?act=page&id=the-progressive-revolt-against-the-founding&pagetype=f
[3] The 1776 Report, President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, January 2021,
fCohttps://f.hubspotusercontent10.net/hubfs/397762/The%20President%E2%80%99s%20Advisory%201776%20Commission%20-%20Final%20Report.pdf
[4] It is worth noting that the 1776 Report makes no claim that this view of human nature is true. Instead it argues that it is a necessary belief for accepting the American system. It is also worth noting that the word ‘democracy’ is never used. The United States is repeatedly described as a republic, never as a democracy. This common conservative meme is designed to emphasize that government is limited while downplaying the role of citizens in creating and using government for a variety of purposes.
[5] https://www.npr.org/2017/10/20/558906151/how-steve-bannon-s-time-in-hollywood-changed-him
[6] Letter to John Tyler, 28 June 1804; https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-43-02-0557#:~:text=no%20experiment%20can%20be%20more,the%20freedom%20of%20the%20press.
[7] “Why Most Published Research Findings are False,” John Ioannidis, PLOS Medicine, August 2005; https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124. See also The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, Michael Strevens, ch. 2-3, W.W. Norton, 2020.
[8] At its core science proceeds in ways that are similar to democratic deliberation and decisionmaking: a variety of interpretations are put forth and vigorously debated; the best of these is adopted, but always subject to further debate and potential revision in light of new evidence.
[9] “The United States Needs a BBC,” Foreign Policy, January 2021; https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/01/28/bbc-partisan-news-united-states-polarization/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29810&utm_term=Morning%20Brief%20OC&?tpcc=29810
[10] “Complex Systems Theory: Some Considerations for Sociology,” Rosalia Condorelli, Open Journal of Applied Sciences, 2015 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305690970_Complex_Systems_Theory_Some_Considerations_for_Sociology
[11] “Exploring Limits to Prediction in Complex Social Systems,” WWW ’16: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web,April 2016; https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2872427.2883001
[12] A useful perspective from the modern Aristotelian philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre can be found in his 1981 book After Virtue, ch. 8 “The Character of Generalizations in Social Science.” After noting the inability of social scientists to come up with the type of ‘’law-like generalizations’’ characteristic of modern natural science, he points to four underlying and permanent causes of systematic unpredictability: 1) radical conceptual innovations; 2) inability of each individual to anticipate their actions; 3) the game-theoretic character of social life; 4) pure contingency. MacIntyre points to Machiavelli and his concept of Fortuna as the most useful way to think about human action. His conclusion is that sweeping claims by scientists or managers are misleading, while modest expert claims within limited fields are respectable.
[13] Amy Guttman and Dennis Thompson, “What is Deliberative Democracy,” in Why Deliberative Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2004).
[14] “Are Citizens Assemblies the Future of Participation?”, Evy Beekers, CitizenLab, Sept. 2020; https://www.citizenlab.co/blog/civic-engagement/are-citizens-assemblies-the-future-of-participation/
[15] “How to think like an epidemiologist,” New York Times, August 4 2020; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/science/coronavirus-bayes-statistics-math.html
[16] “Lochner vs. New York: Fundamental Rights and Economic Liberty,” National Constitution Center, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/lochner-v-new-york-fundamental-rights-and-economic-liberty/