Conservatives Can’t Hide Behind the Trope of “Common Sense”

“Simply invoking ‘realism’ or ‘common sense’ doesn’t add up to anything resembling an argument.”

Introduction

We are both proud leftists dedicated to the pursuit of what we would regard as a more free and just society. In recent years, we have noted a tendency on the part of many conservative pundits to portray the Left as fundamentally antagonistic toward reason and good faith argumentation. This includes figures as diverse as Ben Shapiro andJordan Peterson, and outlets such as PragerU. While we think many of these claims are wildly overstated, both of us have acknowledged that some on the political left are prone to simply dismissing conservative arguments, or refusing to engage with right-leaning media. As pointed out in a preview of Ben [Burgis’] book Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left:

“Too many people on my side only know how to respond to right-wing ideas with mockery or moral condemnation. One danger of this approach is that if we never get around to showing what’s wrong with the other side’s arguments, we’ll end up losing a lot of people who could have been won over.”

This is part of why we have respectively attempted to engage extensively with conservative positions, both in writing and in other media like YouTube, to demonstrate why we believe progressive solutions are more cogent than their competitors. In this article we wanted to continue this project by deconstructing two common tropes one commonly sees in various forms of right-wing argumentation. The first is the tendency to claim that conservative positions are simply more “realistic” than their left-wing counterparts. One sees that in claims such as conservatives care about “facts” while progressives care about feelings, or claims by figures like Greg Gutfeld about why the right is simply “right.” The second trope is claiming that conservatives value “common sense” over the arid abstractions of leftism. Frequent claims include that Republicans favor “common sense government” or talk about “common sense conservatism.”