We no longer live in a democracy. We live in an \u201cemocracy\u201d, where emotions rather than majorities rule and feelings matter more than reason. The stronger your feelings \u2014 the better you are at working yourself into a fit of indignation \u2014 the more influence you have. And never use words where emojis will do.<\/p>\n
There was a time when appeals to emotion over facts were regarded as the preserve of the populist right. But truthiness \u2014 the quality of being ideologically convenient, though not actually true \u2014 is now bipartisan. Last week on the CBS show 60 Minutes, host Anderson Cooper confronted the 29-year-old congresswoman and social media sensation Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with some of her many factual errors. Her reply was that of a true emocrat: \u201cI think,\u201d she replied, \u201cthere\u2019s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right.\u201d<\/p>\n
A good illustration of what Ocasio-Cortez means by morally right was her claim, in an interview on Monday, that \u201cthe world is going to end in 12 years if we don\u2019t address climate change\u201d. Another was her assertion that \u201ca vast majority of the country doesn\u2019t make a living wage\u201d.<\/p>\n
She may be young, female, Hispanic, good-looking and left wing \u2014 in every way the anti-Trump \u2014 but Alexandria Occasionally-Correct shares with the president a genius for the crucial tool of emocratic politics: social media, where moral truthiness always travels faster than the boring old dry-as-dust v\u00e9rit\u00e9.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a> (subscription needed).<\/p>\n Niall Fergusson on the increasingly irrational nature of politics from both right and left..<\/p>\n Feeling beats truth in our indignant \u2018emocracy\u2019 https:\/\/t.co\/DumE3FuDTb<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 ED PARSONS (@edparsons) January 27, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n