Why Trump Invokes ‘Common Sense’
The problem with common sense, goes an old joke, is that it is not so common. A less-recognized problem is that sometimes it doesn’t make sense, either.
Those contradictions were on display during a tense exchange Wednesday between senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush, who asked Miller to provide some proof that low-skilled immigrants are causing job losses for American citizens. Here’s a short excerpt from the much-longer dialogue:
Miller: Let's also use common sense here, folks. At the end of the day, why do special interests want to bring in more low-skilled workers? And why historically—
Thrush: Stephen, I'm not asking for common sense. I'm asking for specific statistical data.
Miller: Well, I think it's very clear, Glenn, that you're not asking for common sense, but if I could just answer your question.
Thrush: No, no, not common sense. Common sense is fungible. Statistics are not.
Moments later, having skirmished over studies, Miller once again returned to the powerful justifying force of common sense: “The reality is that, if you just use common sense—and, yes, I will use common sense—the reason why some companies want to bring in more unskilled labor is because they know that it drives down wages and reduces labor costs.”
The recourse to “common sense” is probably not accidental, especially for a student of political movements like Miller. Nearly every contemporary politician is guilty of falling back on the phrase, but for centuries, populist movements in particular have invoked common sense as a justification for policy goals and as an antidote to expert opinion. Like President Trump, the people invoking it have often done so, as Sophia Rosenfeld writes in her book Common Sense: A Political History, as part of “a populist style of conservatism that celebrated authoritarian governance alongside the traditional ways, values, and language of ordinary people.” (This would have been a much simpler, and faster, story about the Thrush-Miller exchange had I trusted my gut, rather than falling into the trap of seeking out expert opinion.)
Even the specifics of the exchange between Thrush and Miller fit the historical pattern: Common sense has frequently been deployed in service of xenophobic and nationalist concepts, and it has often used elite journalists—say, New York Times reporters—as convenient foils. And when you start hearing a lot about “common sense,” it’s often a sign of national crisis, or at least of a serious effort to undermine faith in national institutions—which few people would dispute.
“Common sense has ... served to underwrite challenges to established forms of legitimate rule ... in the name of the special kind of intuition belonging to the people,” Rosenfeld observes. “Common sense is typically evoked and held up as authoritative only at moments of crisis in other forms of legitimacy. Revolutions, which, by definition, result in divided loyalties and the upending of the rules to multiple domains at once, are a case in point. Otherwise common sense does not need to call attention to itself.”
Time and again, the Trump administration has embraced solutions that it has labeled common sense, but which are either highly disputed, wholly counter to expert consensus, or flat wrong. This has been true on immigration, on protectionism, on industrial policy, climate change, and a range of other issues.
When Thrush told Miller, “Common sense is fungible. Statistics are not,” he was half-right. Common sense is fungible, and what qualifies in one age sounds preposterous in another. (The title of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appealed to the wisdom of people in governing themselves, but it cracked an implicit joke, too: The idea of democratic governance was decidedly not commonsensical for the era.) But statistics are also often fungible. Different studies produce different results; different scholars scope their research differently and land in different places.
Miller, for example, cited a study by George Borjas, a highly respected Harvard scholar who’s known as an immigration skeptic. Borjas looked at the effects of the Mariel boatlift, which plugged 125,000 low-skilled Cuban immigrants into the Miami labor market, and found it had depressed wages. But a different study found little impact; other scholars have argued that Borjas’s research doesn’t really prove what he says it does. Thrush also cited a recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine study that found little effect on wages.
This doesn’t mean that Borjas is wrong, but it shows that finding the single definitive stat that resolves a debate is often impossible. It’s much easier and more effective to retreat to common sense than to get into the trenches of statistical warfare. (Miller, a veteran immigration skeptic, could probably do either, but he also knows that most viewers aren’t ready to dig into the nitty gritty, and thus that common sense is a better political message.)