The rampant irrationality that sparked Jan. 6 is the republic’s greatest threat

On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of United States citizens from across the country stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C. while Congress was in session certifying the outcome of the presidential election. They were incited by lies about the vote started by President Trump and broadcast by his partisans across the media. Several people died and several were wounded, including members of the Capitol police, who took the brunt of the violence. Who can say whether, were it not for the bravery of the officers, senators and representatives would have been among the casualties?

American democracy is in grave danger and the events of Jan. 6 were an acute symptom. Cynical and self-serving politicians and their pundit enablers are hard at work strategizing how to thwart the electoral will of the people. The shenanigans around the 2020 election and its violent aftermath are merely a prelude to the looming debacle of 2022 midterm elections that will fail to yield truly representative legislative bodies at both state and national levels and, more ominously, a bitterly contested 2024 presidential election whose outcome may not be accepted by one of the major parties.

There is no mystery as to who is responsible for this mess. Republican elected officials and party bureaucrats have taken a two-pronged approach. On one hand, they continue to spread falsehoods and disinformation about systemic fraud in the electoral process, seeking to rile up “the base” and undermine its confidence in any Democratic victory. On the other hand, they seek a more permanent, structural change in the electoral landscape through gerrymandering and either replacing or stripping power from state and local authorities who are deemed insufficiently loyal to the Trump cause. 

Before assigning full blame to these Republican officials for attacking what had been the world’s most admired and trusted democratic process, however, we should recognize that the trouble goes much deeper. A more fundamental and insidious disease is at work, a kind of virus that is attacking American minds as the COVID pandemic ravages our bodies. Those politicians and their allies who spread “The Big Lie” and work to undermine our democracy could never have come so far without the unfounded trust of the people who listen to them. According to one survey, 60 percent of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. 

The real problem here is rampant irrationality, and it has the potential to destabilize a political system more than 200 years old.

As philosophers understand rationality, the term means tailoring your beliefs to the available evidence. Rational people accept only beliefs for which they have adequate justification, and they abandon beliefs in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. Irrational people, on the other hand, are epistemically irresponsible when they accept beliefs for wrong or meager reasons, and they are epistemically stubborn when they refuse to relinquish a belief in the face of powerful counter-evidence. 

It is irrational to believe, for instance, the conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party is in cahoots with a child sex-trafficking cabal operating out of a pizza joint in Washington, D.C. Justifying a belief with such great initial improbability demands unusually strong evidence, yet in this case there is none at all. The conspiracy theory, propagated by QAnon and first spread by the so-called “alt-right” on social media, has won a bewildering number of devoted adherents despite complete debunking by law enforcement officials and investigative journalists. Even more widespread is the belief that the COVID-19 vaccine is dangerous — an irrational belief that flies in the face of scientific documentation and medical consensus that it is not only safe but essential if we are going to return to some form of normalcy.

Epistemically irresponsible and stubborn people will acquire and hold on to such beliefs with great fervor. Typically, the fault is not ignorance of the facts — you would have to be living in a deep hole not to have been exposed to widespread reports of the coronavirus’s danger and the vaccine’s efficacy and safety. Nor is it a matter of mere gullibility; even gullible people can know when they have been played. Rather, at work here is an obstinate refusal to see the facts as repudiating what one wants to believe.

Irrationality and epistemic stubbornness amount to a kind of disease that is arguably even more dangerous than COVID-19. COVID has in all too many cases been lethal. But epistemic stubbornness thwarts the effective management of the pandemic and even exacerbates its effects as it creates resistance to the very vaccines that would have prevented many of these deaths and reduced the possibility of more dangerous strains of the disease in the future.  

As for the health and fate of our democracy, the legislators, political leaders and media personalities (including those operating through social media) who continue to promote patently absurd claims that the election was “stolen” from Trump, and who are growing more and more effective in rigging the next election in favor of their own party, could not possibly make any headway were it not for the irrationality of those who believe and support them. Such people are governed not by reason, but by desire or passion. They simply want to believe that Trump won the election and it is this desire, rather than evidence, that forms the basis of their belief. It is a confirmation bias run amok. Or, as Simon and Garfunkel so lyrically put it, “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” 

If irrationality is a kind of disease — one that threatens to overrun our country’s immune system — we must look for an appropriate vaccine. Our chosen profession as academic philosophers makes us partial toward a treatment plan that involves broader teaching of fundamentals in “good” and rational thinking, as well as lessons on how to identify and evaluate moral principles.  

Our public secondary schools embrace a curriculum that includes topics just as abstract as, and even more difficult than, philosophical skills like these — advanced mathematics and science, for example. As philosophers, we are convinced that introducing youth to basic epistemological and ethical concepts will turn them into citizens better equipped to choose officials who will act to preserve the integrity of our electoral system rather than to undermine it. This may not, by itself, save our democracy, but it is a crucial first step. 

Steven Nadler is Vilas Research Professor and William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lawrence Shapiro is the Berent Enç Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They are the authors of “When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us From Ourselves.”