There was even a somewhat rarefied revival of our primitive Yankee boastfulness, the reversion of senility to that republican childhood when we expected the whole world to copy our republican institutions. We amusingly ignored the fact that it was just that Imperial German regime, to whom we are to teach the art of self-government, which our own Federal structure, with its executive irresponsible in foreign policy and with its absence of parliamentary control, most resembles. And wc are missing the exquisite irony of the unaffected homage paid by the American democratic intellectuals to the last and most detested of Britain’s tory premiers as the representative of a „liberal“ ally, as well as the irony of the selection of the best hated of America’s bourbon „old guard“ as the missionary of American democracy to Russia.
The intellectual state that could produce such things is one where reversion has taken place to more primitive ways of thinking. Simple syllogisms are substituted for analysis, things are known by their labels, our heart’s desire dictates what we shall see.
—Randolph Bourne, „The War and the Intellectuals,“ 1917, in War No More, Lawrence Rosenwald, ed., (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2016), 149.
I’m trying to imagine Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton using the word „syllogism“ on national television.
