The economic incompetence of Republican presidents

Berkeley

ONE hears many strange things nowadays, not least because "they" (a complicated term) are flooding the zone with misinformation. Without a shared set of facts upon which to base ethical and policy debates, democracy inevitably breaks down. The system's virtue lies in its unique ability to elevate and consider a broad range of ideas emanating from society. Ideally, through a good-faith exchange of arguments and a weighing of the alternatives, a majority of voters converges on the best course of action.

But we have lost one of the most basic conditions for this process to work properly: a reality-based public sphere. While there were always deep, even intractable, disagreements in the past, people at least were talking about the same thing. One could watch the Abraham Lincoln-Stephen Douglas debates and decide which figure was more trustworthy and convincing without being buffeted by a wave of informational manipulation and distortion.