How Can We Share a Country If We Don’t Share a Reality?

Note from the author: An earlier version of this piece appeared under a different title. This version includes substantial revisions, additional research, and expanded arguments.

Democracy is worth defending. But there’s a foundational requirement for it to function that we rarely talk about explicitly, perhaps because it seemed too obvious to require articulation: we have to agree about what has actually happened in the world. I don’t mean we need to agree about what events mean (we can argue endlessly about whether a given policy was wise or disastrous, whether a political figure deserves praise or condemnation). But we do need to be able to converge on the basic facts of what occurred. Without that shared epistemic ground, we’re not having a disagreement that democracy can mediate. We’re having mutually unintelligible conversations about different realities.

A significant minority of Americans has abandoned that requirement, and they’ve broken democracy in the process.

Trump’s approval rating among Republicans sits at 88%. Think about what that number represents. The FBI released data in August 2025 showing violent crime dropped 4.5% in 2024. Murder fell 14.9%. Crime sat at its lowest levels since at least 1969. These aren’t contested figures. They’re from multiple sources that are traditionally reliable and cross references rigorously. However, nearly all Republicans believe crime increased last year. Trump is deploying National Guard troops under a “crime emergency” declaration. He sent federal forces to Portland and Chicago, describing them as war-ravaged cities requiring military intervention. War-ravaged cities. With crime at 56-year lows. And 88% of Republicans approve.

Or consider this collection of beliefs that millions of Americans currently hold: 30% believe Joe Biden stole the presidency despite no evidence of widespread fraud after countless Republican-led investigations. One-third of adults believe COVID vaccines have caused thousands of sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people. 63% of Republicans think the January 6th defendants deserved pardons. Some argue that dragons are real but dinosaurs are fake. Climate change is a hoax but weather control machines exist.

These are people believing things that didn’t happen while denying things that did.

I spoke with a woman at a coffee shop in suburban eastern Washington State, she told me she stopped speaking to her daughter over the 2020 election. Five years later, she’s still there. She showed me videos on her phone (grainy, ominous music, authoritative male voice) explaining how algorithms switched votes. When I asked if she’d looked at the actual vote tallies, the hand recounts, the Republican election officials who verified the results, she said, “You can’t trust any of that. They control all of it.” Who’s they? “The people who run things.” But Trump appointed many of these officials. “That’s what they want you to think.” Every piece of contradictory evidence became proof of how deep the conspiracy went.

She wasn’t just defending what happened in 2020. She was already building the case for Trump to run in 2028, despite the Constitutional two-term limit. “Democrats stole the election in 2020, and the Russiagate hoax and vaccines were used by democrats to stop him in his first term, so it’s only fair.” The goalposts don’t just shift. They multiply. One conspiracy becomes the foundation for the next, each one requiring you to deny a new set of delusions. Her daughter, a high school teacher, couldn’t maintain the relationship. The reality gap was too wide to bridge.

Eighty percent of Americans now say Republicans and Democrats cannot agree on basic facts, according to Pew Research. Not policies. Not values. Ultimately, they’re getting entirely different information to begin with. When Anthony looks at the emperor, he can see the absence of clothing. But 88% of his fellow Republicans insist the outfit is magnificent.

The data on Trump’s actual governance tells a straightforward story. His overall approval sits at 39%, with 56% disapproving. These numbers have remained essentially unchanged throughout both his terms. He’s losing some ground among women (net negative 28), seniors (net negative 12), and Hispanics (net negative 46), but among Republicans? 88% approve. His administration presides over the second week of a government shutdown as of October 10th, with 41% of Americans blaming Republicans versus 30% blaming Democrats. The national debt increased from $36.1 trillion in early January to $37.4 trillion by September 2025, despite promises to reduce it. His “One Big Beautiful Bill” that extended tax cuts is projected to add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years. He promised not to touch Medicare or Medicaid. The bill cut $1 trillion from Medicaid over a decade. He promised prices would “come down fast” and he’d “end inflation on Day One.” Food prices increased in March 2025, and 68% expect prices to keep rising. He promised to end the Ukraine war “before even arriving at the Oval Office.” Ten months later, there’s no peace deal. When questioned about the broken promise, he told TIME Magazine, “Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest.”

Campaign promises weren’t campaign promises. They were jokes. His approval remains steady. And 88% of Republicans approve.

These are facts anyone can verify. The debt numbers come from the Treasury. The bill’s projections come from the Congressional Budget Office. The crime statistics come from the FBI. You can look them up right now. But if you’re in that 88%, you either won’t, or you’ll find a way to explain why the Treasury Department, the CBO, and the FBI are all wrong. Or lying. Or part of some conspiracy. Whatever Fox, Facebook, and Musk tell you to believe.

Research published in Nature Human Behaviour found that Republican politicians increasingly share less trustworthy information sources when expressing beliefs. The study documented a fundamental shift in how truth itself is evaluated. Approximately 70% of Republican voters considered Trump honest despite thousands of documented false statements. But here’s what the researchers discovered: these voters weren’t evaluating honesty by accuracy. They were evaluating it by the authenticity of their feelings.

The crime statistics don’t feel true to them, so they aren’t true. The deficit numbers don’t feel true, so they aren’t true. The broken promises don’t feel broken because the authentic feeling behind them matters more than the outcome. When Trump said he’d end the war in Ukraine before taking office and then nine months later told TIME Magazine it was “said in jest,” the 88% didn’t see a broken promise. They saw authenticity because his emotional stance toward the war felt genuine, regardless of the outcome.

The study reveals why fact-checking fails. You’re not correcting mistakes. You’re challenging an entire framework for determining what’s real. Facts are downstream of feelings in this model. The feeling comes first (Trump cares about me, America is under threat, the system is rigged), and then information gets filtered to support what already feels true. Contradictory information isn’t false. It’s part of the conspiracy.

These Americans aren’t confused. They’ve chosen a story that feels true over facts that don’t. Everyone has access to the same internet. The FBI crime statistics, deficit numbers, vote counts, death rates, Trump’s actual business history, his documented lies (it’s all right there). But millions have decided that all of this is fake while anonymous posts about microchips in your flu shot and Trump’s secret genius reveal hidden truths.

When a third of the country believes that hurricanes are God punishing gay people, how do you craft disaster preparedness plans? When they think the president is managing a crime wave that doesn’t exist, how do you discuss law enforcement funding? When they think wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers and climate change is fake, how do you discuss evidence-based environmental policy?

You don’t. If we can’t share reality, we cannot share governance.

And it’s not just that they operate in a different factual universe. The leaders of this movement have made clear they view Democrats not as political opponents but as enemies to be destroyed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has described progressives and Democrats as ‘enemies’ of freedom, the U.S. Constitution, and America, stating that victory for America includes defeating what he calls leftism. Trump himself has repeatedly called Democrats ‘the enemy from within,’ describing them as more dangerous than Russia or China, and told military leaders that Democrats are ‘vicious people that we have to fight, just like you have to fight vicious people.’ Donald Trump Jr. told Newsmax that Democrats ‘want you and your kids dead.’ These aren’t political disagreements. They’re declarations of war against most of the country.

When one side explicitly refuses to participate in democratic norms, continuing to play by those norms becomes self-defeating. You can’t keep playing chess when your opponent keeps adding pieces to the board and moving their pieces wherever they want. At some point, recognizing you’re not actually playing chess anymore isn’t defeatism. It’s recognizing a starting point from which you can actually address the issue at hand.

But there is no middle ground between “the thing happened” and “the thing didn’t happen.”

So what follows from this?

Two Americas are already emerging, and they’re diverging faster than most people want to acknowledge. Red states ban books about Rosa Parks while teaching creationism. They reject federal healthcare funding while their hospitals close. They pass laws based on conspiracy theories about litter boxes in school bathrooms. Blue states build renewable energy infrastructure, fund public health systems, and create bilateral agreements with each other that functionally bypass federal dysfunction. Democratic run states are interested in governance and democracy while Republican run states are not, there is no middle ground or compromise to be found between the two.

Some will say this is defeatist, that we must keep trying to reach these people with facts and evidence. But you can’t educate people out of beliefs they didn’t reason themselves into. The internet and the media have become a huge confirmation bias machine for those who want it.

The practical implication is straightforward. If you live in a red state, fight for voting rights expansion and ballot initiatives that improve quality of life despite the fantasy your state government operates within. If you live in a blue state, strengthen your institutions. Build systems that don’t depend on federal cooperation. Create frameworks with other reality-based states. Strengtehn public education, universities, research institutions, and statistical agencies from political interference because they’re the only things preventing complete epistemic collapse.

Call it soft secession, pre-balkination, whatever you want; it’s already happening. We need to decide if it happens as a deliberate, managed separation or as a chaotic disintegration.” Major insurers have already withdrawn from Florida because climate change is real whether Ron DeSantis admits it or not. Businesses are leaving states that ban books because educated workers won’t move there. Reality asserts itself through economics when it can’t assert itself through politics.

A country requires some degree of cooperation and consensus, not just about laws and borders. When one-third of the country sees rain and another third sees sunshine while looking at the same sky, you don’t have a country with different weather preferences. You have two populations occupying different dimensions who happen to share geographic coordinates. At some point, we need to stop pretending otherwise.

Some people believe what they see, others choose to see what they believe.

Governance with bad faith fascists is not tenable, we don’t just have an election and then return to normal. This conclusion follows directly from observable facts, regardless of political preference. Democracy is worth defending, but it cannot function when a significant minority has abandoned the factual foundation democracy requires. The solution isn’t to keep pretending we can govern together. The solution is to recognize we’re already governing separately, formalize that reality, and build systems that function for those of us still living in the actual world.

If this analysis resonated with you, consider supporting this work. Political accountability journalism requires documenting the gap between promises and outcomes with rigorous research. Your subscription enables the time-intensive work of tracking down data and creating frameworks for understanding what we can do to fix this mess.

If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy my book “Conservatism: America’s Empathy Disorder,” which explores the psychological and neurological roots of how a political movement can abandon democratic principles in favor of power.

https://a.co/d/0TQ8o1w

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