Non-rational means "emotional", not "irrational".
One may be passionate based on moral conviction, wisdom, ethics without being irrational.
The opposite of "rational" is not "emotional" or "passionate". The opposite of rational is irrational - which describes some act or attitude which cannot be justified by logic or rational dialectic based on Natural Law (which embrace morality/passion as vital, profound elements of human existence, not just human morphology/physiology).
Many ignorami (sic) like that freakish sub-moron in the article, are utterly oblivious to the "symptoms" of emotional health. People who believe there is a rational basis for every positive attitude are, in a word, idiots. Virtually all attitudes are based not on reason, but emotion. All competent psychologists know this.
Rational beings without significant, conscious emotional aspects to their opinions are nothing more than ants. The emotional vacancy of leftists is what often allows them to become murderous, violent despots so readily. They are in regard to emotion, similar to someone who castrates themselves and claim to have "transcended sexuality".
Self-mutilation/castration is not transcendence.
Many (virtually all) of the most murderous leaders in modern history were cold-blooded rationalists who convinced themselves and everyone who followed them (save perhaps those they tried to murder) that whatever bad things happened in the course of their efforts was necessary because their plan, "made sense," and was, "ultimately for the best".
Nazis. Communists. Muzz terrorists. Ecoterrorists. All driven to do horrible, inhuman things for what they see as "necessary reasons".
Note the term "reason(s)". Fanatical rationalists are too often monsters - intellectually justifying every single atrocity they commit. All with the stone-faced, emotionless monotone or the arrogant, leering/sneering malevolence of the truly insane - detached from normal emotions and seeing their own deformity (dysfunctionality) as a sign of "superiority".
Psychologists call being emotionally non-functional, "dissociated". It is one of the risks of a life fanatically devoted to "rationalism". Eventually even reason must yield to the reality of God (though God IS reason itself in an ultimate sense). A belief that passion equates to irrationality (as that self-mutilated, emotionally-stunted freak above stated) is itself likely a symptom of fairly severe emotional illness from my POV. Passion is NON-RATIONAL, not irrational.
Karl Marx no doubt saw himself as being, "beyond emotionalism," whereas he was IMO simply emotionally non-functional (vacant/dull).
CG Jung said, "Those who absolutely deny any significant effect of their unconscious mind upon them are the most-likely to be utterly consumed by it".
Some examples of people who become utterly consumed by their unconscious minds are...psychotics, serial murderers, sociopathic criminals, schizophrenics, psychopaths, despotic tyrants. Adolph Hitler. Rasputin. Jim Jones and followers. Charles Manson and his Family. The people who ran the Nazi Gestapo/concentration camps, Stalin's NKVD/KGB, Saddam Hussein/Osama Bin Laden. All rationalists who slept like babies after doing things to innocent people in pursuit of their rationalistic "master-plans" that would make normal people vomit.
All the above-monsters delivered their opinions about this and that, condemning with the level, oceanic, calm gaze of poisonous, cold-blooded, reptiles.
There is a significant difference between sub-human and super-human.
