Only our most intimate friends know our deepest flaws, and in the same way the greatest skeptics about reason should be those who seek to defend it. … - Julian Baggini

In this way we can see that political reason is as much – if not more – bottom-up than top-down. Rationality requires attending to objective reasons for belief and many of the most important such reasons are provided by what we observe in the world. Indeed, what we observe is of primary importance: there is no hope of understanding justice, for example, if we attempt to do so purely by examining the concept without any reference at all to what we perceive to be just or unjust in the world.

Our obsession with our differences has created the impression that there is no common domain of rationality within which disagreements can be thrashed out. We just have a multiplicity of discourses and rationalisations to legitimise different interest groups. This is not just a criticism of those currents of thought broadly and loosely labelled postmodern. The enemies of postmodernism have set themselves up as the sole champions of reason – something made easier by their opponents’ willingness to relinquish the labels of rationality and reason. In so doing they too have contributed to the sense in which the intellectual sphere is too fragmented and divided along factional lines for any general dialogue to be possible. By dismissing large sections of the intellectual community as anti-rational, the anti-postmodernists have also contributed to the sense that it is pointless to seek to argue one’s case in the widest possible forum.

Disenchantment with politics is therefore toxic, and populism can only increase such disenchantment, since it leads to the promise of simple solutions that cannot be delivered, while removing from the public square the more nuanced kind of discourse that is needed to explain why it can’t work.