For over a decade I’ve been lugging around on my laptop a presentation describing the contrasting values and vocabulary honored by liberals and conservatives.
Among those differences are conservatives’ love of common sense as against liberals’ reliance on expert opinion.
The bolded preamble to the 2024 Republican platform called for a “Return to Common Sense.” Candidate Donald Trump then declared Republicans “the Party of Common Sense.”
Trump’s inaugural address called for a “revolution of common sense.” Three days later addressing the Davos conference, Trump declared, “What the world has witnessed in the past 72 hours is nothing less than a revolution of common sense.”
When asked how he knew the helicopter-plane crash at Washington’s Reagan National Airport was the result of DEI programs, Trump’s answer was simple, “common sense.”
That phrase was also used to justify Trump’s immigration policy, Department of Government Efficiency cuts, the dismantling of USAID, banning paper straws, eliminating the penny, ending efforts to combat climate change and myriad other policies.
Trump’s first term was also marbled with references to the phrase.
In contrast, Democrats put their faith in experts. While candidate Trump claimed common sense backed the efficacy of his economic policies, Democrats rolled out a group of Nobel Prize winning economists to make the argument against his approach.
While Trump asserts burning fossil fuels is common sense, Democrats fight back with statistics about temperature increases and scientific opinion.
While Trump contends DEI causes plane crashes, Democrats (like me) focus on studies showing diverse teams make better decisions.
The most famous invocation of common sense was as the title of Tom Paine’s tract that is credited with igniting the movement for American independence and self-government.
As (expert) University of Pennsylvania historian Sophia Rosenfeld points out in her magisterial history of common sense, before Paine’s pamphlet, American colonists were focused on obtaining what they considered the rights of Englishman.
Paine, a bankrupt ex-corset maker, urged independence and democratic self-government, galvanizing the public behind those ideas.
In excavating the phrase, Rosenfeld makes clear a paradox of common sense: it is often neither commonly shared, nor considered sensible.
When Paine wrote, most American colonists were not even considering independence from Britian, nor democracy.
The problem is evident from Mellman’s First Law of Aphorisms, coined here long ago: For every aphorism, there is an equal and opposite aphorism.
How common is the belief “out of sight, out of mind” versus how many cleave to the notion that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and which group is empirically correct?
Is there, as Judy Garland chanted, “no place like home” or “is the grass always greener on the other side?” And which phrase more accurately captures human behavior?
All these maxims are common sense, but opposites cannot both be true.
In common conversation, assigning the label common sense to one’s views is an attempt to shut down discussion not to enhance the search for truth.
While Trump and company use the phrase to suggest their views are both widely shared and obviously correct, nothing can be farther from the truth.
As I’ve documented in several previous columns, majorities of Americans oppose the very polices Trump labels “common” and many of them are in fact nonsensical.
Nevertheless, conservatives and Republicans honor what’s called common sense as opposed to Democrats and liberals who give credence to expert opinion.
A 2012, University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll asked whether respondents agreed or disagreed that “most of the time, instinct and gut reactions are just as good as the advice of a scientist.” Two-thirds of Republicans endorsed the primacy of common sense over expert opinion while two-thirds of Democrats disagreed.
A survey by psychologists Flavio Azevedo and John Jost found liberals would rather put their “trust in the opinions of experts and intellectuals” by a 27-point margin, while by a 16-point margin, conservatives prefer reposing their trust in “the wisdom of ordinary people.”
A Pew Research poll last year found Republicans were 28 points more likely than Democrats to consider themselves “skeptical of what experts say.”
Simply bringing forward even more experts, as Democrats are wont to do, may not prove effective (at least according to experts). As John Adams put it, “Facts are stubborn things, but our minds are even more stubborn.”
Researchers from the University of Chicago and Northwestern found the views of economists on policy differed significantly from those of ordinary Americans — and differed most on items where the economists displayed the highest degree on unanimity.
Moreover, informing people about the prevailing views of economists did very little to change their views.
While continuing to utilize and communicate expert opinion, like Tom Paine, Democrats will have to label our approach “common sense” and explain our positions in common sense terms if we are to bring more voters under our tent.
Mark Mellman is president of The Mellman Group a consultancy that has helped elect 30 U.S. senators, 12 governors and dozens of House members. Mellman served as pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for over 30 years and is a member of the American Association of Political Consultants’ Hall of Fame. He holds degrees from Princeton and Yale.
