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> But, the whole of his complaint rests on this deficiency. It's not possible to constructively disagree with someone who is unwilling to acknowledge basic facts, or who promotes an alternate reality. This really needs to be emphasized--if you cannot agree on what the facts are, you will never come to a real conclusion. This is something the article completely glosses over. However, I also I think there's also something beneath just agreeing on what constitutes facts that is equally important, which is a (roughly) shared value system. The old, "liberally educated" world that the author references the death of in the 1960s (i.e. "Closing of the American Mind") was one of shared values--largely white, protestant values. What replaced it was a different value system--I've seen it called the "meritocratic" value system, or similar--which had fundamentally different core values, and was/is dominant among American conservatives and liberals until recently. Currently, the furthest left and furthest right often don't agree on core values. On the left, I think almost any argument that uses a variation on "(holy text) said so" can be dismissed off-hand as an unconvincing argument when you're talking about things beyond your own personal behavior--however, my Mormon relatives feel quite differently. This gets uglier and further away from the mainstream when you start to dig into some of the belief systems that groups on the alt-right propose (simplifying, but often things like "only white people have intrinsic value"), as opposed to the mainstream belief systems of the last ~40 years ("all people have intrinsic value"). Similarly on the far left, I've seen a lot of disagreement with other things that I'd hold up as mainstream values of the last 40 years (such as "competition between independent actors leads to good outcomes for consumers*"). Disagreements when fundamental values differ will put any argument on hold before it gets started, and I expect the only real outcome is things that devolve into shouting matches, or worse. And from what I've seen, the range of acceptable values has widened dramatically in the last 15 years--I'm curious to see if this winds up coalescing into a new set of mainstream values after a while, or if things like the structure of the internet/"filter bubbles"/increased ideological splits will mark the end of an ideological "mainstream" as it used to exist. |