Sentence:  As the requirements of mass democracy forced the gentleman intellectual from the political scene, the new style political leaders felt the need to flatter the electorate by stressing the superiority of inborn, natural, intuitive and folkish wisdom and to devaluate the <WSD>ratiocinations</WSD> of the cultivated. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  Reasoning, conscious deliberate inference; the activity or process of reasoning.