I forget the exact context, but at some point my colleague and I were trying to make the point that Hillary Clinton should be in jail.

It may have seemed like an ideologically motivated throwaway line.

BROKE

It was not. We said that she broke the law (through her private email servers). It was and is the law. And she broke it. End of debate.

Oh no. Not the end of debate. Someone at the table blurted out, “well, they’re your facts. Not mine”.

You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts. Now, not so much. At this point, you realise there is no point.

Some of us often wonder why some political actors and many among the 60 per cent are so averse to logic, evidence, science (defined as empirically verifying falsifiable hypotheses through replicable experiments), reason, debate and making concessions to reality in the face of overwhelming confirmation you are wrong.

It is not hard to find examples of policies and governments that are either stupid or evil or pointless – or all three. That don’t pass the logic/evidence test.

Mostly we don’t get evidence-based policy. We get policy-based evidence. Look at COVID zero. Look at climate change. Look at the purported benefits of mass immigration.

Don’t forget American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Look at quantitative easing (the monetary tree). Look at trying to regulate the internet. Look at socialism. And all central planning.

Especially look at the argument that more female leaders make for better governance. Look at the claim that mass, public child care from the earliest age makes for happier children. No one ever really tries to argue the merits on these.

Look at continuing with failed policies and expecting a different outcome.

When cognitive dissonance rules, the game is up. Look at the bizarre ability to hold simultaneously the view that fossil fuels emissions are evil, and that it is fine for Australia to export coal to China so that they can “pollute” the planet.

Some years back, I argued in Quadrant magazine that ideology can make us believe and say some odd things, and so make fools of us all. Especially the progressive Left.

They always take “one for the team” in the face of facts that destroys their position.

One of the consequences of ideology-driven, rather than fact-driven, political positioning is that it ensures baseless positions and arguments survive in the marketplace of ideas for way longer than they should.

It also often makes ideologues simply look stupid, when they hold to embarrassing positions in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.

Yet, because ideology trumps evidence, these people have no option but to keep digging the hole. The results ain’t pretty.

The power of ideology can be lethal, logic wise. But there are other explanations of what we call persistent policy stupidity syndrome:

• Intellectual and/or moral pride;
• The belief that your opponent isn’t just wrong, but morally inferior;
• The postmodernist belief that there is no truth, only opinion;
• The postmodernist and Marxist practice that power trumps all else, including debate and contested views – individual debates are merely battles in a larger war, which must be one;
• A winner-take-all approach to politics and governing, meaning that you can never, ever be seen to have lost;
• The doozy of them all – the belief that logic itself is a white, male, heteronormative, colonialist social construct.

Most of these defy logic.

There are many elements to this, and repeating themes. Many on the so-called Right – really, the centre – naively yearn for the days of rational policy debates, and a fair intellectual contest.

They see politics as being like an event at the Oxford Union. The progressives and Leftists of our day see politics as war.