Instead, it was Descartes who always seemed to be given credit for daring to pursue an understanding of the human condition unclouded by the presuppositions of revealed religion. Even though Descartes remained a member of the Roman Catholic church, his pursuit of truth outlined in his 1637 publication Discourse on Method sought to free the pursuit of reliable knowledge from its traditional ties to revealed religion.

First he abandoned any philosophical or theological presuppositions. Then he identified his most unshakeable conviction: his capacity to doubt. From there he moved in a deductive step-by-step process, accepting only “clear and distinct ideas” and ending up with a framework that asserted our ability to trust our sense perceptions of the external world. A divine being figures as a critical step in the argument as the one who guarantees that we are not deceived as the data from the outside world makes impressions on our inner life of the mind. While Descartes’ mention of divinity may have allowed him to escape the charge of atheism or heresy, his god was most certainly not the personal and trinitarian God of Christian orthodoxy. Perhaps most significant of all, Descartes’ account identified rationality as the most quintessential feature of humanness. His dictum, “I think; therefore I am” says it all.

Trump’s victory doesn’t seem to have been caused by Democratic ideological divisions, nor by Democratic candidate quality. So what led to these nightmarish results?

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Matthew Yglesias pointed out that this has been a brutal time for all incumbent parties across the world. Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party had one of its worst elections in its very long career on October 27. Austria’s People’s Party lost 20 of 71 seats in Parliament in late September. Over the summer, Britain’s Tories were crushed by Labour in an unprecedented landslide, while France’s centrist coalition scrambled as it lost a third of its seats. The Canadian incumbent Liberal party looks in serious trouble for elections next year, too.

As Yglesias says, there’s no one ideological throughline here; parties of the left, right, and center alike have struggled as voters blame them for the dislocations caused by covid. These included shutdowns and recession initially, but lingered with supply chain issues and a global spike in inflation.

Biden’s economic stewardship was among the best in the world; the US has had 27 consecutive months of inflation below four percent, and inflation is currently at its lowest in years. But the anger at inflation and economic dislocation post-covid lingers. In exit polls, 72 percent of respondents said they were angry or dissatisfied with the country’s direction.

Those are brutal numbers — so brutal that you’d usually expect them to result in a landslide victory for the out party. Instead, Democrats almost fought to a draw in the presidency, hung on to many close seats despite a brutal Senate map, and may even have picked up seats in the House.