How to save our liberal democracies with neuropolitics

A new substack after the US 2024 election and the uncertain times ahead

It’s 2016, I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Trump was just elected as President. Everyone’s shocked. It’s 2024, I’m back in Berlin and Trump just got re-elected as President. Everyone’s shocked again. How can it be that political experts, media pundits and so many people around me who should have figured it out by now still seem so clueless about as to what has led to this outcome?

I’m starting this substack as a way to share with you my insights into the political human brain, which I believe have been ignored for too long. I believe that this ignoring, or misunderstanding, of who we are as political animals at the brain level, has led to the meteoric rise of populist parties and politicians who reject liberal values and post-Cold War democratic systems across the world.

At its core lies a disastrous inability to understand what is happening in the brains of these voters, and yes, also in Trump’s brain itself. The level of dehumanization and demonization of these voters has led to a cognitive inability to understand, predict and address their minds. This is not about bringing in neuroscience as a fancy addition or buzz word into our analysis. It’s about making sense of who we are fundamentally as human beings, cross-culturally and across the identities that divide us.

In parallel to the birth of optimistic post-Cold War theories about the end of history and the eventual victory of liberalism and the free market, political neuroscience arose quietly as a new exciting subfield less than two decades ago. I started my studies of political science, with a specialization in political theory, first in the UK at the University of Cambridge and continued in the US at Columbia University in New York, in the 2010s. I was an outsider in two ways: firstly, as a political scientist who was obsessed with authoritarianism and the fragility of liberalism (with my 20th century German and Chinese family background, this made complete sense to me but not to the US Fukuyama-happy crowd or the self-assured EU public policy cotton industry); secondly, as an Asian woman political theorist (there aren’t that many of us).

Being that double outsider gave me a superpower. I was invisible. I could examine and think about the events that unraveled around me with an enraged curiosity and calm motivation that was immune to outside academic trends during the self-deceptive Bush and Obama years. I could collaborate with groundbreaking social neuroscientists (Lasana Harris, my PhD advisor, whose work on the dehumanizing brain had a particular impact on my book) and political thinkers who were seen as eccentric in their fascination with the political psychology of International Relations (Robert Jervis), ethnonationalism and democratic wars (Jack Snyder) and Hobbes’ fear of erroneous imaginary constructs by the human mind as the source for social collapse and the return to a brutish state of nature (David Johnston). This was all shortly before Brexit, the 2016 US election and the rise of the AfD in Germany hit, and, needless to say, all of these fringe topics suddenly became very central.

What I tried to present in my book Vulnerable Minds: The Neuropolitics of Divided Societies and what I would like to share with you through this substack, is a novel neuropolitical theory for pitching our liberal democratic project anew, not just to those within our bubbles but also those with whom we have the biggest disagreements and on whom we have given up. I’ve been thinking about this issue for a long time now, first growing up as a German girl with Chinese immigrant parents in reunified Germany and the German Expat bubble in Beijing during the late 90s; then as a foreign student, faculty and immigrant to the US during both the Obama and Trump years; then as a person with a Chinese background living in Taiwan during the Covid pandemic.

From having experienced so many divided societies, I observed that the current strategies for making people agree to liberal values or shaming them through cancel culture (yes, cancel culture is real, though not exactly in the way how the far-right thinks — a topic for a future post) failed miserably. They keep failing, as this 2024 US election and German election results show as well, but people on the liberal Left keep holding onto these strategies. It's desperate, inefficient and oftentimes arrogant.

The world and brains are burning, but those intellectual elites that I used to look up to when I began my studies are failing us in not being able to come up with a new language and theory about how this great liberal democratic project of ours can actually succeed. That’s at best, actually. At worst, they are spouting some alternative populist nonsense like Chantal Mouffe, who calls for a leftist populism in response to Trump. This is the same Chantal Mouffe who irresponsibly helped to popularize a clean-washed version of the German Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt during my studies, completely ignoring the effects this might have on the rise of authoritarian state power glorification and the erosion of a constructive, non-polemic discourse about liberalism’s shortcomings.

I do not believe in countering populism with populism. I do not believe in closing our minds to those that we disagree with politically. I do not believe that anything thought or done by human beings is so inhumanly monstrous that we are unable to make sense of it, however much we morally or politically reject it.

I believe in our capacity to become autonomous, enlightened agents of our dehumanizing brains, if only we can begin to understand the cognitive mechanisms that drive us. I do not believe that neuroscience data can tell us who we are, but only what our brains do. It is up to us to decide what kind of society we want to live in to achieve greatest fairness and freedom from political domination, and what kinds of brains we need to cultivate for this most challenging endeavor of our modern times.

This can only be successful if we commit to a paradigm shift about our understanding of who we think we — and others whom we disagree with — are as political animals. If we continue down the current path, the great liberal democratic experimental artifice that Hobbes envisioned and that I have been lucky enough to experience in my lifetime is doomed to failure. We need to start to face up to the reality of our brains, and create a radically new humanizing language and Weltanschauung as a result of it.

In neuropolitical solidarity,

Liya Ragnhild Yu