One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy
Morgan Marietta and David C. Barker
Abstract
Is climate change real? Does racism still determine who gets ahead? Is sexuality innate? Do immigration and free trade help or hurt the economy? Does gun control reduce violence? Are false convictions common? On these and many other basic questions of fact, Americans are deeply divided. How did this happen? What does it mean? And is there anything we can do about it? Drawing upon several years of original survey data and experiments, Marietta and Barker reach a number of enlightening and provocative conclusions. Among them is that dueling fact perceptions are not so much a result of hyper-part ... More
Is climate change real? Does racism still determine who gets ahead? Is sexuality innate? Do immigration and free trade help or hurt the economy? Does gun control reduce violence? Are false convictions common? On these and many other basic questions of fact, Americans are deeply divided. How did this happen? What does it mean? And is there anything we can do about it? Drawing upon several years of original survey data and experiments, Marietta and Barker reach a number of enlightening and provocative conclusions. Among them is that dueling fact perceptions are not so much a result of hyper-partisanship or media propaganda as they are of simple value differences and deepening distrust of authorities. The educated—on both the Left and Right—carry the biggest guns and are the quickest to draw. These duels foster social contempt—even in the workplace—and they warp the electorate. And finally, the remedies that have been proposed don’t seem to holster many weapons; in fact, they add bullets to the chamber in some cases. Marietta and Barker’s pessimistic conclusions will challenge idealistic reformers.
Keywords:
dueling fact,
misinformation,
misperception,
partisan fact,
disputed fact,
fact-checking,
political knowledge,
populism,
motivated reasoning,
polarization
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190677176 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2019 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190677176.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Morgan Marietta, author
Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell
David C. Barker, author
Professor of Government (American Politics) and Director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, American University
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