@ohir

Whether its irrational or not is a frame-of-reference issue. Many really stupid policies are good for some, or in the short term, so might be considered 'rational' in terms of the self-interest of immediate beneficiaries. But obviously that's a false standard of rationality.

@ChrisMayLA6

@TimWardCam

I believe the rejection of reason and evidence on the political right - in favour of 'authority' - is precisely what most radically distinguishes it from the left.

Right-wing thought IS a rejection of reason and evidence – hence of science. As Sartre put it, the right wants to stop thinking, ‘longs to become the stone’. This is why the Spanish fascists chanted ‘Death to Intelligence! Long Live Death!!’, why religious fundamentalists always tend to align with the intolerant right, why an English politician during the brexit controversy said ‘This country has had enough of experts’, why a right-wing American politician, in a rare moment of honesty, recently said that he ‘doesn’t care about reality’ - and why in general the more educated people are, the more left-wing they are, and it is the political right that denies climate, vaccines, or any other inconvenient science..

The left-wing bond to reason and evidence, the right to irrationalism, goes back to the origin of the political division between ‘left’ and ‘right’ – in the seating arrangements in the National Assembly in the French Revolution – those with power and privilege on the speaker’s right, commoners on the left. We should never forget the real basis of this division, which lies not in ideas or values, but in the reality of social inequality and injustice – but following hard on this reality is the fact that those on the left had to argue that people are capable of organising society on the basis of reason – while the right relied on tradition, religion/superstition, force – ‘authority’ of various kinds, rather than reason and evidence.