Donald Trump's son compared refugees to skittles on twitter. He tried to make a logical analogy, in that you wouldn't eat a handful of skittles from a bowl if you knew three of them were poisonous. He then compared the poisonous skittles to Jihadists and the rest of the skittles to refugees. The whole analogy was an exercise in precaution, why let the refugees in when you know a few of them could be terrorists who can harm the USA.
Well, the argument seems logical at its core but therein lies the problem; it is too simplistic and reductionist, hardly taking into account the complexities of issues and the policies designed to deal with them. But if there is one party that's made a living out of reductionist arguments, it's the Republican Party.
Reductionism involves breaking down a complex phenomenon into simple and understandable parts. It is widely used in science, maths and philosophy. But, in politics, it is often used to pick and choose incoherent arguments and misrepresent details to propagate a political agenda. The ideas are so simplistic that to make it seem legitimate it is piled with lies masquerading as facts. And, once reductionist political arguments clings to a bias; other relevant contexts, facts and details that make the phenomenon a whole are utterly dismissed. The biased argument then proceeds to categorise opposition into monolith groups that are often described as either evil, lazy, entitled or having an agenda against common good. Such characterisations make it easy to disregard or dismiss concerns of the "others".The Republican Party has used this technique in the past and continues to use it in the present as a legitimate political discourse. We evaluate some of the examples below.