I stumbled on an article about how people tend to disagree regarding facts. It was clear from the start the author was seeking to explain the hyperpartisan nature of our political divide. I wasn't too impressed with the outcome. The closing paragraph stipulates our liberal democratic institutions are designed for disagreement, but these disagreements hinge on agreeing upon facts, a process which seems straightforward, but which he implies is broken and liberal democracy cannot fix. I'm not sure I agree that the process of agreement is straightforward, and I do believe liberal democracy can fix the issue.
I, however, disagree with the closing paragraph. The problem, as stated, is incorrect. People tend to agree about facts, so the adjudication process remains adequate. The issue seems to be that few people want to agree, even when they know they are wrong and the facts have presented themselves. If you play poker, as I do frequently, you've probably seen exchanges like this. You have 2 Queens in the hole and one on the board. But there are 3 spades on the flop, and betting action convinces you that a flush is in play. You convince yourself the 3 Queens will hold, and shove all your chips in. When you lose, you blame the person with the flush for not folding to the clearly superior bet, rather than analyzing your decision to shove as a mistake in the face of the facts as they'd presented themselves.
I see this behavior all the time in poker. Literally. Just last week I had a fellow, whose chips I'd taken, complain that I'd bet into his two of a kind even as he was raising me...but I had a flush! "You didn't know if I had a full house based on my betting!" The desire to avoid responsibility for a decision, opinion, or choice is rampant in people today because they've been raised to believe there are no repercussions. If he had the full house, I'd have congratulated him and left the table.
Out political discourse today isn't broken because we disagree on facts. It's broken because some people just want to ignore the facts and rely on opinion. It is a fact, proven over many years and the rapid extensive growth of our nation, that free markets work. It is a fact that every other socialist nation in history has failed miserably, or (in the case of certain Scandanavian nations) scaled back their socialist tendrils significantly. Despite these facts we still get Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Occasional Cortex offering up their pablum of class warfare. It isn't that they disagree on the facts. They know socialism has never worked. They just believe their socialism is somehow different and better (what's the definition of insanity?).
The same can be said for the divide regarding race and gender. It's not that we necessarily disagree on facts. Women don't face the same difficulties they faced long ago in the workplace. Men acknowledge that bias existed, and still exists to varying degrees. We do disagree on how to manage and implement the changes necessary on overcoming the remaining bias and keep the ball moving forward. But the Identity Politics of the Democrats refuse to acknowledge any gains have been made, that in order to move the ball forward, we need to increase the unfairness so women are favored over men, and this will somehow magically 'fix' the remaining issues.
Ignoring facts and blaming other people for not ignoring them with you is not a disagreement on facts. Liberal Democracy fixes this sort of thing naturally, over time, as evidence of failures build up. It creates cultural dislocations not too dissimilar to what we're seeing now, or which we saw in the 1960's. These dislocations eventually resolve themselves. The process of reaching that resolution seems long, slow and painful. Mainly because dislocations like this are rare, so people who go through them haven't usually seen them before.
