Quoted in response to Raskin, Senator Josh Hawley: "I was really disappointed they didn't engage much with the legal standards. This is a legal process after all. Very little engagement."
When do we get to bypass studying the factual details and legal standards and all the links in a chain of reasoning? When is it okay to just look at the whole thing and rely on instinct and just know that something is right or wrong?
The answer can't be: When it helps my side win.
People who liked Raskin's appeal to "common sense" — as opposed to "lawyers theories" — need to realize it's also the way Trump argued that he won the 2020 election. You just look at what you can see and feel what you feel.
And that's how Trump has been talking to his people all along. In your heart, you know he's right... or, in your guts you know he's nuts.
Bias has become the preferred form of reasoning. Better not get bogged down in lawyers theories. The other side is off and running.
Here's an article in by Sophia Rosenfeld in The Nation from 2017, "The Only Thing More Dangerous Than Trump's Appeal to Common Sense Is His Dismissal of It":
Trump began his quixotic campaign for president as the embodiment of a familiar kind of right-wing, common-sense populism. Instead of deference to well-trained scientists, academics, journalists, and even governmental authorities, he touted the true wisdom of "the people." In place of fancy studies built on research, data, and modeling, he promised plain-spoken, off-the-cuff reports on the state of our world and obvious, practical solutions to our problems.
That is, Trump suggested politics was actually quite simple if only one would rely on the kind of basic reasoning which emerges from just going about normal, everyday business using one's senses and instincts and which—surprise, surprise—tends to run counter to "establishment" conclusions....
[T]he populist appeal to common sense was already a time-tested strategy to gain votes on the right... [W]hen asked about global warming, the smart move was to say that it had to be a hoax because we got a lot of snow last winter.... Common-sense truths require no further study to prove themselves correct—or so the theory goes. They are just things that everybody knows, and if they had any sense, would readily agree upon too.
This faith has a long American pedigree. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan often promised "common-sense solutions" on issues from taxation to foreign policy, drawing on folksy aphorisms to make his points. He linked the idea to the founding fathers, and, in particular, to Thomas Paine, who had once promised, in defense of a then-radical cause, to give his readers nothing but "simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense."
Trump, of course, eschews history. But when he announced that the solution to illegal immigration was building a very big wall along the southern border, it was clear that—the racism of the idea aside—he was speaking in this same faux-practical mode.... By undermining faith in traditional sources of intellectual authority, from the major news outlets to the National Institute of Health and the CIA, common-sense populists recast all those who participate in the "knowledge industry" as biased enemies rather than objective analysts working in the interest of the common good....
He has also, since well before he became a serious candidate for the presidency, refused to accept various realities even when provided with concrete, demonstrable evidence.... In George Orwell's (once again best-selling) dystopian novel 1984, Big Brother and the Party are tasked with denying "the very existence of external reality" and telling you "to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears"—until such point as "the heresy of heresies was common sense."
For even common sense—whose "biography," Orwell's contemporary Vladimir Nabokov once quipped, "makes for nasty reading"—still requires of its practitioners a certain kind of independence of thought, given its relationship to skepticism, or the ability to detect the lies and obfuscations of others...
Here's that Nabokov quote with some context:
In the fall of 1811 Noah Webster, working steadily through the C's, defined commonsense as "good sound ordinary sense . . . free from emotional bias or intellectual subtlety… horse sense."
This is rather a flattering view of the creature, for the biography of commonsense makes nasty reading. Commonsense has trampled down many a gentle genius whose eyes had delighted in a too early moonbeam of some too early truth; commonsense has back-kicked dirt at the loveliest of queer paintings because a blue tree seemed madness to its well-meaning hoof; commonsense has prompted ugly but strong nations to crush their fair but frail neighbors the moment a gap in history offered a chance that it would have been ridiculous not to exploit.
Commonsense is fundamentally immoral, for the natural morals of mankind are as irrational as the magic rites that they evolved since the immemorial dimness of time. Commonsense at its worst is sense made common, and so everything is comfortably cheapened by its touch. Commonsense is square whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round, as round as the universe or the eyes of a child at its first circus show.
