Governance on Rational America

7 Ways Enlightenment Values Can Fix American Governance

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Let’s get one thing straight before the next hot take loads.

The American experiment started as an argument. A handful of white-wigged men were not merely debating whether a king could tax tea. They were wrestling with something more philosophically ambitious: how to build a government that could survive its own citizens’ worst instincts. And they did not reach for muskets or divine right. They reached for the intellectual toolkit of the European Enlightenment—reason, toleration, science, balanced powers, natural rights, educated citizens, and a stubborn faith that the future could improve on the past.

The Secret of Reason in Public Policy: Why Rational Thinking Keeps Losing Elections

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0400

The committee room smelled like stale coffee and burnt ambition. A young economist finished her briefing — forty pages of regression outputs, comparative risk assessments, and a clear-eyed cost-benefit analysis. She clicked to the last slide, looked around, and smiled. The silence stretched long enough to confuse. Then the chairwoman spoke: “Okay, but what will the voters think?”

Point made. The proposal went nowhere.

That scene replays in every legislature on every continent, morning and night. Reason enters the policy process like a polite guest who shows up early to the party, only to find the host has drunk the party favors and set the couch on fire.

The Secret of Sane Government: What Every Voter Needs to Know About the Importance of Reason in Public Policy Making

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0400

The fluorescent lights hummed. The hearing room smelled like stale coffee and nervous deodorant. On the agenda: whether to extend a school mask mandate that expired at midnight. Nobody on the committee had opened the department’s epidemiological bulletin that morning. Nobody had read the expert testimony from the week before. But everybody, it turned out, had an opinion.

In under forty minutes they voted to let the mandate lapse. The director of public health — seated, unmiked, in the back row — never got asked a single question.