Feelings and Emotion trumps Reason

MercatorNet has one of the best assessments of Obama's victorious campaign that I've found thus far. Obama diligently targeted Women, Latinos, Progressive Catholics, and Youth, and it paid off.

Here's one excerpt that explains how:

The day before the election, Politico carried a column, picked up on news radio, that the youth vote was not engaged this time around, that they felt overlooked and under-appreciated and so they would largely sit out this election. That turned out to be very wrong. Despite predictions like that, voters 18-39 made up 19 percent of the electorate who turned out – actually up from 18 percent in 2008 – and 60 percent of them voted for Obama. Why?

“Obama was very effective in his messaging and campaigning with this group,” explained Johnnie Moore, vice-president of Liberty University and a ‘young evangelical dynamo well versed in the behaviors of the millennial generation,’ according to the Washington Post and other media. He told me that demographic was “motivational more than informational,” and the Obama campaign slogan “Forward” worked, which was a big surprise to me.

“Millennials are anti-political, but civically engaged,” he said. “Young people vote for one reason – they feel like the person cares about them.” And Obama managed to convince them of that.

He declared the Millennials to be “the most pro-life generation” in post-Roe history, which seems at odds with voting for the most pro-abortion president in history. But he admitted feelings/emotion trumps reason for a lot of these voters.

And that’s probably the best summary of the whole electorate at this point in US history. This country has changed, probably irreversibly now, with this election. Nobody the day after denied that. But the election didn’t change the country; it reflected the change that has come over the past several years.
On that score, Obama delivered.

He changed his position on marriage and wrote it into his party platform. He changed the platform belief that abortion should be ‘safe, legal and rare’ by removing ‘rare,’ because that implies some moral calculation, as a Washington pro-life attorney told me. His campaign charged the US bishops and other religious leaders as launching a ‘War on Women’ by resisting the HHS mandate. And against all reasoning, it worked. He campaigned in 2008 on fundamentally transforming America. There’s no question he’s halfway there. With this election victory, he has been given the time to complete the project.

A very good spiritual director challenged me once to express myself not in "I feel" statements, as I had been taught to do in the therapeutic realm, but with "I think" or "I believe" statements. One was a feminine statement and the other was a masculine statement.

I came to see the Dictatorship of Relativism as one in which Feelings would prevail over Reason. It seems no accident that the same feminist movement that promotes a feminine worldview coincides with the rise of moral relativism and its emphasis on feelings and subjectivity over rational objectivity.

As the article quoted above indicates, Obama is truly the feminine vote, and the triumph of the Feminine in the secular sense has become the triumph of Moral Relativism. Contrast that with the Feminine Genius and the personalist morality of the Late Great JPII. His was a philosophical framework that balanced femininity with masculine objectivity. May we strive to embrace masculinity as much as femininity, ordering our feelings of right and wrong according to objective standards of right and wrong as elucidated in the clear teaching of God through Church doctrine.