Paul Campos relates an argument about how hippies and evangelicals actually represent a sort of horseshoe theory when it comes to what the author calls "intuitionist" thinking. This is at the root of what passes for populism in 2025. Some people believe in science and reason and some people don't.
As Campos notes, you can't argue with someone whose beliefs are based in spiritual belief. That means that the entire edifice of Madisonian governmental theory and practice are largely helpless to resolve these issues.
I'll give an example.
I saw my cousin - deeply religious - post some MAGA shitbird complaining about the No Kings protests and the argument went something like "How dare they complain about 'kings' when they shut down schools and made me wear a mask. They are the real tyrants."
Look, Covid killed around 1,100,000 Americans. For about a year and a half, we had strong distancing measures in place that attempted to mitigate that, but even those measures struggled to work, because freedumb. The idea that public health measures are at all equivalent to ignoring the Constitution, ignoring court orders, militarizing police to attack American citizens...How do you even argue with that?
And if you tried, the retreat into faith and "what I know to be true" would deny you any ground to establish an argument on.
Both sides of the debate are relying on abstractions to order their world, but they are so fundamentally opposed to one another, that I don't see how you reconcile them.
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