Reality Check: In a fact-free era, what can we agree on?

As the whole world ponders the outcome of national elections (a subject which Grits has for the most part dutifully avoided, focusing on my own Texas criminal-justice turf), the big-picture question which disturbs me far more than the temporary resident of the White House is, "How did political discussions in America become so divorced from reality?"

I don't mean reality as in, "the way I see things." I mean reality as in a baseline respect for facts and math. The Pew Charitable Trusts recently published a remarkable poll describing whether or not Americans think progress has been made on different topics during Barack Obama's presidency. Here are the topline results:

I find most of these numbers unfathomable. To take the topic most closely associated with this blog, Crime: By any mathematical measure the nation is better off than in 2008. But only 15 percent think that's true while 57 percent think crime has gotten worse. This is delusional thinking that flies in the face of reality.

Certainly that impression has been exacerbated by the president-elect's stump speech in which he's been going around the country claiming crime is the highest it's been in 45 years, when in fact the exact opposite is true. But that's relatively recent. Long before that, the public believed crime was rising when it was actually falling. I've speculated before on the reasons, but it's a persistent, frustrating phenomenon.

Similarly, 55 percent think the immigration situation is worse than in 2008. But under President Obama, the feds ramped up deportation to highest-ever levels and illegal Latin American immigration precipitously declined.

On the Economy and Jobs, the idea that things are worse now, with unemployment below 5 percent, compared to 2008 at the apex of the Great Recession when the entire global financial system was threatened, beggars belief. Where could such a perception come from? It's utterly divorced from reality.

Of the others, US "standing in the world" and "security from terrorism" are subjective assessments and so those aren't opinions which can be refuted or supported. They're just a function of people's impressions. To me, the metrics say our standing hasn't declined - our military and economic might stand unparalleled and American-generated tech is transforming the globe. And I don't feel less safe from terrorism than when President Bush was prosecuting the Iraq War, which to me was a generator of those problems more than a solution. But because there's no hard metric on which to base an opinion, Grits will let those disagreements pass on the reality-check front.

Race relations is the only area where I can understand the public's view that things have gotten worse. For those judging purely from what one sees in the media from the comfort of one's living room, I'm not surprised most white Americans might think race relations have gotten worse. My own personal view is that recent debates over race and policing merely exposed longstanding problems rather than created them. But there's no doubt race relations remain strained, and those strains are hungrily aired in the media using click-maximizing strategies that gravitate toward the nastiest, most entrenched Culture War debates.

Regardless, that's four of the seven major areas identified by Pew where, objectively, the public's views directly contradict the facts. It's not just that there's countervailing evidence, the public objectively, demonstrably thinks things are true which are false.

I'm not saying this to defend Barack Obama's record. The election is what it is and I don't care a whit about protecting (or harming) the Dems' brand. But how did we get to this place where the majority of the public simply believes big, important things which are not true? And far more important than who is in the White House, how can we change THAT? That's the part of the last year which for me has been unbelievably dispiriting.