Like Peeling Esher's Onion
Ever since Fox News and talk radio displaced the more moderate form of corporate mass media that preceded their control, we have been experiencing the distorting effects of an alternative information system. 

One such effect is the usual layering of conflicts (as we debate conflict A, we discover there is are deeper disagreements about conflicts B and C that we need to either disentangle or resolve before we can return to A) has transformed into something like peeling Esher's onion.

One such instance today is, in discussing any policy or political question (immigration, trade, court appointments, whatever) we inevitably circle back to a fundamental disagreement about the degree to which our current president lies.

Even this is layers. Sometimes the disagreement is about facts: some asserting he is not lying (or not more than others) and others he is (and a lot more often). Sometimes the disagreement is what this means: some asserting that he is generally right while often getting specific facts wrong and others that he is both generally misleading and specifically inaccurate.

This is part of the Fox News effect. 

It is partly a reflection of the fact that there is now a loose coalition of 'news' outlets whose stated mission is not to try to inform the public in some less partisan way, but their objective is to train many publics in their preferred sound bites, to propagandize for the hard right business community.

It is also partly a reflection of the fact that the conflicts that end up on our political agenda are gnarly. Were they not, they would have been resolved in civil society with no need to transform these into public conflicts. 

As such, the FN effect is both about a well-funded (decades old) far-right corporate campaign to manufacture consent and about an even older phenomena: we disagree about a lot of stuff, including the putative 'shared values' all sides claim to recognize (like freedom of expression, free and fair elections, well regulated free markets).

But, let's dismiss the factual version so we can return to the more gnarly one.

“In his first 10 months in office, he has told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly. Obama told 18 over his entire eight-year tenure. That’s an average of about two a year for Obama and about 124 a year for Trump.” (New York Times analysis)

170 Political Scientists who study the presidency were polled recently. They ranked our current president at the bottom. 45 out of 45. Even if you count only those among the 170 who are Republican, his rank is still 40 out of 45. This same group ranked President Obama as #8. 

"The one area where Mr Trump did come out on top was in the “most polarising” section, in which the researchers asked the scientists to list the five presidents they found most divisive. Mr Trump was ranked most polarising by 90 of the 170 respondents, and second-most polarising by another 20."

Of course, one aspect of the FN effect is, with many of our fellow citizens we are never able to put the factual debate aside in this way. That is both frustrating and sad. And consequential for the survival of democracy, particularly in an era where we see a sustained assault on voting rights and union organizing and public education and common sense environmental regulation and women's bodies. While most do not want to admit it, we are only one small step from the Handmaid's Tale.

And we see this, and are rightfully concerned, only by examining the factual dimension of our political debates. It is possible that the factual dimension will turn out to only be important in terms of how effectively is divides and confuses and frustrates regular folks, ceding even more territory to elites already willing to frame everything as a zero sum contest over their 'strict father' understanding of the rule of law.

On top of all this, or beneath all of this, we do actually disagree on a lot of important stuff.

The promise of democracy is that, despite disagreements, we share a hope and an agreement about process and basic values that results in respect for the rules of the game, meaning we play the game of politics to win but not in a ruthless way, we want to win today and we also want to preserve the game so we can continue to play tomorrow.

Seeding deeply confusing and frustrating and divisive disagreements about facts with glitzy sound bites produced by highly paid and skilled PR experts saps that hope, challenges the importance of respecting the game, makes the nuclear option an everyday tactic on the road to more concentrated and less accountable power.

As frustrating as it is, regular folks need to keep peeling back Esher's onion. Keep reminding ourselves and those who disagree with us that without respect for the game even the ever-shifting onion disappears and our relief from Esher's onion is simplicity by design, familiar echo chambers erasing uncomfortable facts and disagreements at 451 degrees.