The 2020 election is not really a choice between Democrats and Republicans, it is more of a choice of what America is going to be in the future. The question on the ballot is whether America is going to retain and strengthen its reliance on the logic and reason of Western Civilization or abandon it to adopt the savagery of being ruled by emotion and violence. America was founded on the former and has relied upon that stability and consistency for over two centuries, the latter is on display today in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and in other large cities around the country.

Emotional reasoning (ER) is a real thing. ER is when a person’s degree of “rightness” about a thing is directly proportional to how a person feels about that thing. Their emotional reaction to something thereby defines reality and any observed evidence is disregarded or dismissed in favor of the assumed “truth” of their feelings. For example, for many Democrats the angrier they are at President Trump and the more they hate him, means their conclusions about him are accurate.

The problem with ER is that it is not real reasoning, it is based on emotion and emotions can be manipulated and therefore wrong. Emotions run the gamut from love to anger – and history proves the most heinous actions have been taken in service to one or the other. Emotions result in some of the most arbitrary and capricious actions that often result in the most unequal treatment imaginable. Not really a prescription for stable, fair and equitable governance and when combined with a people who never reason to a logical endpoint – only to a level of emotional satisfaction – it gets even worse.
ER does have some basis in logic, but the process is incomplete. No doubt it is one of the most, if not the most, baffling psychological problem to acutely feel the reality of something without it having any basis in fact.

I think this explains a great deal of the frustration and anger of the left, the fact that when they inquire of themselves just what are the facts that support their emotionally-based determinations or if they are negatively “mind-reading” another’s intentions because they have unresolved issues with them or whether they take things more personally than makes any logical sense. Many times, ER causes an individual’s reaction to result in an act of “fortune-telling”, that they’re grounded in a prediction that the present event, because it resembles some past event, is bound to turn out the same way. Logical fallacies all, but all tied to emotional reasoning.

I’m not even sure the “protesters” in Portland and Seattle even really know or understand why they are angry, they just know they are – and in a weird sort of way, they are comfortable with that because it feels right to them.

The Democrat National Convention this week seems to indicate a political party that has adopted a platform based on emotion and violence and proposes this is the way to create a more equal society and economy – but nothing is farther from the truth. Governance guided by emotional reasoning results in emotion and violence – and guarantees that it is not only the person who yells the loudest who gets the attention but when that person also does so with threat of violence, they assume control. Do you think the city government has control in Portland? The police? Or is it the angry rioters?

Is this what we want for our country?

It is certainly not what I want.