{"id":38700,"date":"2025-02-06T13:45:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-06T13:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=38700"},"modified":"2025-02-07T04:41:13","modified_gmt":"2025-02-07T04:41:13","slug":"how-populist-leaders-like-trump-use-common-sense-as-an-ideological-weapon-to-undermine-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-populist-leaders-like-trump-use-common-sense-as-an-ideological-weapon-to-undermine-facts\/","title":{"rendered":"How populist leaders like Trump use \u2018common sense\u2019 as an ideological weapon to undermine facts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dannagal G. Young<\/a>, University of Delaware<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s \u201cthe revolution of common sense<\/a>,\u201d President Donald Trump announced in his second inaugural address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so it is. The latest installment of that assertion came in his Jan. 30, 2025, press conference<\/a> about the Potomac plane crash. When asked how he had concluded that diversity policies were responsible<\/a> for a crash that was still under investigation, Trump responded, \u201cBecause I have common sense, OK?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCommon sense\u201d is what\u2019s known to scholars as a \u201clay epistemology<\/a>,\u201d or how regular people make sense of the world. We don\u2019t rely on statistical evidence or expert research while we\u2019re buying lettuce or driving in traffic. Instead, we\u2019re guided by direct experience, emotions and intuition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because it comes from regular people and not institutions that some people deem to be \u201ccorrupt,\u201d champions of common sense suggest it leads to a purer form of truth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet it is precisely because it comes from personal observations and intuition that research shows common sense is steeped in bias<\/a> and often leads us astray.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Populist leaders like Trump commonly celebrate common sense<\/a> and attack expertise and evidence. Populism is less about being liberal or conservative than it is a way of appealing to the public<\/a>. These appeals are based on a moral separation between the corrupt, bad people with cultural power and the good, pure people who hold the right values \u2013 like faith in common sense over expertise and evidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And with the new Trump administration, the elevation of common sense as a virtue has been quick and broad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dusty boots vs. elite credentials<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In his confirmation hearing<\/a> for the position of secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth pointed to \u201cdust on his boots\u201d as evidence of his qualifications, in contrast to the elite credentials of past defense secretaries, who have often been Washington insiders<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hegseth couldn\u2019t name members of<\/a> the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, an alliance of countries playing a crucial role in global security. But he did show that he knew the diameter of the rounds that fit in the magazine of an M4 rifle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was evidence that he was, in his words, \u201ca change agent. Someone with no vested interest in certain companies or specific programs or approved narratives.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even Meta\u2019s announcement<\/a> that it would roll back expert fact-checking on its U.S. social media platforms reflects a \u201clay epistemic\u201d shift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meta explained that fact-checkers, \u201clike everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives\u201d and that these biases had made fact-checking \u201ca tool to censor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, the company would embrace a community notes model<\/a> where users could provide additional information on posts, which Meta argued would be \u201cless prone to bias.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen this approach work on X<\/a>,\u201d wrote Meta\u2019s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, \u201cwhere they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This policy change is probably less of a shift in Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s principles than a change made out of necessity. Given Trump\u2019s penchant for falsehoods<\/a>, I imagine Meta\u2019s previous policy would soon have proved financially and politically inconvenient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regardless, the result is a populist\u2019s dream: the demotion of formal expertise in favor of \u201ccommon sense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Common sense is ideological<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For the past two decades, the rise in social media, combined with declining trust in formal news organizations<\/a>, has democratized knowledge: the sense that no one person or institution has special access to truth \u2013 not scholars with many degrees, not experts armed with scientific evidence or data, and definitely not journalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a 2020 study of public sentiment across 20 countries<\/a>, Pew Research Center found that the overwhelming majority of those surveyed, 66%, reported trusting people with \u201cpractical experience\u201d to solve problems over experts. Only 28% trusted the experts to solve problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If institutions and experts are perceived as corrupt and ideological, the only truth that we can trust is what comes from our own eyes and our own minds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But does common sense bring us to truth? Sometimes, yes. It\u2019s also appealing: Since our observations of the world are informed by our values and beliefs<\/a>, we often see what we want \u2013 such as diversity-hiring initiatives known as \u201cDEI\u201d causing a plane crash, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And our intuition rarely tells us we\u2019re wrong. This helps account for the existence of confirmation bias<\/a>, which is our tendency to see and remember things that tell us we\u2019re right. This is also why, even in those rare instances when facts change minds, they rarely change hearts. If we do update our knowledge with correct information, research has shown that our gut will still tell us our overall view of the world was right<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, studies<\/a> also show that the more a person trusts common sense, the more likely they are to be wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My research<\/a> has shown that the people most likely to believe misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 election were those who placed more trust in intuition and emotion, and less trust in evidence and data. In addition, the more people liked Donald Trump, the more they valued intuition and emotion \u2013 and rejected evidence and data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, common sense is ideological.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When our pathway to knowledge is limited by our experiences and intuition, we\u2019re not actually looking for truth. We\u2019re happy with whatever answers are available, including conspiracy theories<\/a> or explanations that make us feel good and right<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We blame individuals \u2013 especially people we don\u2019t like or identify with \u2013 for their own misfortune. We tend to think \u201cthose people should be better and try harder\u201d instead of looking for public policy solutions<\/a> to problems such as poverty or drug addiction. Without evidence and data summarizing large trends \u2013 such as cancer rates<\/a> tracked through National Institutes of Health funding or ocean temperatures<\/a> tracked by National Science Foundation funding \u2013 we are limited to what we can see through our own eyes and biases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And our limited observations merely reinforce our underlying beliefs: \u201cMy neighbor probably has breast cancer from taking that medicine I don\u2019t like\u201d or \u201cToday is probably just a randomly hot day.\u201d We\u2019ll either overgeneralize from or downplay these limited examples depending on what our \u201ccommon sense\u201d says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, when populists elevate common sense as a virtue, it\u2019s not just to celebrate how regular people understand the world. It\u2019s to promote a worldview that rejects verifiable facts, exaggerates our biases, and paves the way for even more propaganda to come<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dannagal G. Young<\/a>, Professor of Communication and Political Science, University of Delaware<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dannagal G. Young, University of Delaware It\u2019s \u201cthe revolution of common sense,\u201d President Donald Trump announced in his second inaugural address. And so it is. The latest installment of that assertion came in his Jan. 30, 2025, press conference about the Potomac plane crash. When asked how he had concluded that diversity policies were responsible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":38701,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15534,8025,46,295,10,296,36,4],"tags":[787,16014,244,479,6117,16013,4269,885,891,886,860,10799,15832,780,1748,7920],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38700"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38700"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38702,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38700\/revisions\/38702"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}