I think it's fair to say we live in an age when reason has been practically abandoned entirely. I could site a million examples from the Trump admin alone, but I don't want to waste my time on him. I want to consider why and how reason become obsolete.
Our founders believed that an educated and inform citizenry could govern themselves. In their time, there was still partisanship, lies, and propaganda. However, there was more of a general respect for reason as a means of governance.
Now, I believe that conservative ideology is inherently deceitful because humanity has always been so primitively cruel and unjust that maintaining old social and power dynamics denies the truth of those injustices. However, what America used to have was a shared idea of how decisions should be made, what a politician's role was, and the importance of our checks and balances. Even though literacy rates were much lower than today, the people had a far more active role in politics.
In the modern era, we are more educated and informed than in any time in history. The marketplace of ideas is both far more vast and more confusing than ever before. Progression in education have dispelled so much ignorance in every area of knowledge and life.
At the same time, technology has transformed the way we take in information and make decisions. Television, and then social media, made it possible to reach people through quick images and phrases that illicit powerful emotion without any real substance. The financial dynamic of television and advertising, before Citizens United, radically skewed social and political influence. Combine this with the decision that corporations can fund political campaigns, and we have a situation where support is more about mathematical advertising calculations than the content of someone's policies. These problems are universal.
I don't believe that technology and money is all to blame for the abandonment of reason. With the rise in education, scientific research, and social sciences, the right-wing found itself in a situation where virtually all of their positions and policies were suffocating under facts and reason.
In the era of the internet, facts and rationality are not viable for Republicans. They cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas. The majority of Americans may not be active voters, but they do stand against the bigotry and greed of the Republican party. A decade before Trump, Republicans completely gave up on rational debate. The new technological engine of news headlines, memes, click bait, and graphic videos are perfectly designed for stoking hate and misinformation.
Hate is all the Republicans have left. The radical return of open racism is a realization that it could never return under the belief of reason and discourse. The only way it can return is through abandoning shame and the guise of wanting to make sense. Bigotry and bipartisanship have brought the party to a point where rampant obvious crime, corruption, and human rights violations are accepted as casually as government's real functions.
Reason is dying because it doesn't work for people in power.