Until a few years ago, deliberative democracy and protecting the public sphere were the central issues in political debate. Now it’s the turn of emotion and post-truth politics, and no wonder: how else to explain why America’s disaffected working classes voted for a billionaire who is making the rich richer in 2016, or why the Leave campaign in the UK won over swathes of those who will be hardest hit by the consequences of Brexit.
However, does it follow that people were simply responding to their feelings in these events and going with their gut? More broadly, does the divide between reason and emotion in politics still hold true?
Advances in neuroscience have confirmed that thinking and feeling are intimately interconnected. If in the past of politics not everything could be attributed to the operation of reason, it’s equally true that not everything now can be ascribed to the pull of emotion. Yet in network societies where the weaponization of information is reshaping democratic politics at a very deep level, emotions have certainly made a comeback, and are often considered to be at the core of the current populist wave.
