[from Washington Post article]…
“It’s a huge deal, because in the end you really can’t govern, and you can’t persuade people, if you do not have a common basis of fact.”
Sadly, I don’t believe this is the case anymore. Politicians seemed to have made a discovery: that having a basis for one’s claims is utterly irrelevant. You can say whatever you want, win elections, and govern, without any common basis of fact whatsoever. What IS required today is to capture a sufficient number of people’s imagination and effectively utilize their emotions. I don’t think this is going away soon… in fact, it was discovered by advertisers in the 1940s. It just took Washington a bit of time to catch up. And the implications going forward are quite serious, quite unpredictable, and almost certainly not good.