Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Not even a congenital optimist can see a pony in this Christmas stocking. But will Donald Trump (and authoritarian populism more generally) really undo a quarter of a millennium of progress? There are reasons not to take poison just yet. If a movement has proceeded for decades or centuries, there are probably systematic forces behind it, and many stakeholders with an interest in its not being precipitously reversed.

By the design of the Founders, the American presidency is not a rotating monarchy. The president presides over a distributed network of power (denigrated by populists as the “deep state”) that outlasts individual leaders and carries out the business of government under real-world constraints which can’t easily be erased by populist applause lines or the whims of the man at the top. It includes legislators who have to respond to constituents and lobbyists, judges with reputations of probity to uphold, and executives, bureaucrats, and functionaries who are responsible for the missions of their departments. Trump’s authoritarian instincts are subjecting the institutions of American democracy to a stress test, but so far it has pushed back on a number of fronts. Cabinet secretaries have publicly repudiated various quips, tweets, and stink bombs; courts have struck down unconstitutional measures; senators and congressmen have defected from his party to vote down destructive legislation; Justice Department and Congressional committees are investigating the administration’s ties to Russia; an FBI chief has publicly called out Trump’s attempt to intimidate him (raising talk about impeachment for obstruction of justice); and his own staff, appalled at what they see, regularly leak compromising facts to the press—all in the first six months of the administration.

Also boxing a president in are state and local governments, which are closer to the facts on the ground; the governments of other nations, which cannot be expected to put a high priority on making America great again; and even most corporations, which benefit from peace, prosperity, and stability. Globalization in particular is a tide that is impossible for any ruler to order back. Many of a country’s problems are inherently global, including migration, pandemics, terrorism, cybercrime, nuclear proliferation, rogue states, and the environment. Pretending they don’t exist is not tenable forever, and they can be solved only through international cooperation. Nor can the benefits of globalization—more affordable goods, larger markets for exports, the reduction in global poverty—be denied indefinitely. And with the Internet and inexpensive travel, there will be no stopping the flow of people and ideas (especially, as we will see, among younger people). As for the battle against truth and fact, over the long run they have a built-in advantage: when you stop believing in them, they don’t go away.²⁸

The deeper question is whether the rise of populist movements, whatever damage they do in the short term, represents the shape of things to come—whether, as a recent Boston Globe editorial lamented/gloated, “The Enlightenment had a good run.”²⁹ Do the events around 2016 really imply that the world is headed back to the Middle Ages? As with climate change skeptics who claim to be vindicated by a nippy morning, it’s easy to overinterpret recent events.

For one thing, the latest elections are not referenda on the Enlightenment. In the American political duopoly, any Republican candidate starts from a partisan floor of at least 45 percent of the votes in a two-way race, and Trump was defeated in the popular vote 46–48 percent, while benefiting from electoral shenanigans and from campaigning misjudgments on Clinton’s part. And Barack Obama—who in his farewell speech actually credited the Enlightenment for the “essential spirit of this country”—left office with an approval rating of 58 percent, above average for departing presidents.³⁰ Trump entered office with a rating of 40 percent, the lowest ever for an incoming president, and during his first seven months it sank to 34 percent, barely more than half of the average rating of the nine previous presidents at the same point in their terms.³¹