I would like to think - and maybe I would be wrong, but follow me on this path for a moment - I would like to think that reasonable people should, at the very least, be able to agree on certain things.
As an example, let's take the issue of healthcare. At the least, Democrats and Republicans should be able to look at the healthcare system in America and see that we're paying considerably more than any other countries per person (the next closest is Switzerland, at $2,000 per person less, and their GDP per capita is higher than ours). That's a solid fact we should be able to agree on.
We should be able to agree that the total medical debt in this country is $81 Billion, or that more than 40 Million Americans have unpaid medical bills (note: that's counting only bills in default... some 30 Million Americans are in debt but making at least minimum payments toward their bills).
We should be able to agree that the average cost of insurance for a single person in 1999 was $2,196, and that in 2018 it was $6,896.
We should be able to agree that the trendline showing all the years in between 2018 and 1999 shows that prices haven't fluctuated wildly year over year - that is, they've been growing at a pretty steady $245.6 per year, and that even during the depression they were right on that trend line.
We should be able to agree that the average cost of insurance for a family plan in 1999 was $5,791, and that in 2018 it was $19,616.
We should be able to agree that the trendline there, too, doesn't fluctuate wildly. Prices have grown fairly steadly at a rate of $724.23 per year.
We should be able to agree that the median household income in 1999 was $42,000, and that in 2017 it was $61,372. We should be able to agree that this means the average household was spending 13.8% of its earnings on health insurance in 1999, and spending 30.6% in 2017.
We should be able to agree that the Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare, didn't cause any change in the increase in rates - to the chagrin of both parties (that is, it didn't go up as Republicans would like to claim, and it didn't go down as Democrats would like to claim).
We should be able to agree on these things because agreeing on them doesn't mean that suddenly your political opponents have been right all along, or that just because you agree on the problem you also necessarily agree on the solution.
But that's not where we're at.
Instead, even basic fact reporting has to be twisted and contorted into our personal world view. We accept the facts that agree with us, and discard the facts that don't; worse still, we change the facts to fit our world view when we can't ignore them.
Unfortunately, the more we divide ourselves along party lines, the more we cut off competing news sources and amplify supporting news sources, the more we block and unfriend and ignore people who disagree with us, the more hardened in our ideology we get... and that seems like a problem that is only growing, with "news stations" that only provide one partisan version of news and events, with Facebook becoming an echo chamber, with trolls of all kinds intentionally attempting to subvert our information stream and mislead us.
Our elected officials seem to follow this trend. Instead of acknowledging facts that disagree with their ideology, many times you'll hear politicians answer such a fact by saying, "look, all I know is..."
That's not acceptable, for either side. We have to start fighting for politicians not because they agree with all of our beliefs, but because they are committed to the scientific method, because they are committed to studying problems and finding solutions through careful measurements, through trial and error. We don't need politicians who are RIGHT so much as we need politicians who are WILLING TO BE WRONG.
But that, in this society today, is political suicide...
