When they talk about reason they mean a mishmash of ideas they picked up at university.

From The closing of the conservative mind: Politics and the art of war by John Gray.

There is nothing singularly British in this development. Though the term political technology first emerged in post-communist Russia to describe the use of new media in military-style strategies of deception, it is something practised in many countries. The mutation of politics into warfare is contagious in much the same way that freedom was once supposed to be contagious.

The technologists of power are today’s true rationalists. That superior intelligence is found among the practitioners of populism is a fact of our time. When liberals talk about reason they mean a mishmash of ideas they picked up at university. Scraps of Rawls, Dworkin and Thomas Piketty, together with a smattering of modish conspiracy theories, form the folk wisdom of the thinking classes. Rationality means deferring to this ragbag of ephemera and ignoring enduring truths about the deciding forces in politics.

The whole article is an interesting take on the turmoil in Britain but it has echoes of the struggle between citizens and establishment which is going on in countries around the world.