Some days it feels like the loudest opinion automatically becomes the truth, at least in American politics. From a distance, you might be forgiven for thinking the whole thing is a logic exercise gone wrong. But the closer you look, the more obvious it becomes that predicate logic was never invited to the discussion in the first place.

The problem starts long before the shouting even begins.
People simply do not agree on what the determining factors are, never mind how they should be weighted. One person treats the economy as the only thing that matters. Another prioritizes identity. A third focuses on moral history. A fourth just goes with whatever reinforces their personal worldview. With everyone using a different scoring system, facts do not stand a chance. They become optional. Decorative. Background noise.

So yes, from a shallow position, it really does look like opinion outweighs fact.
But that is only because the entire foundation needed for facts to matter has already collapsed. There are no shared premises, no shared definitions, and certainly no shared understanding of which variables belong in the equation. Everyone builds their own logic tree, then gets angry when no one else wants to climb it.

And this is where predicate logic dies a quiet death.
Not because people cannot reason, but because they refuse to agree on the inputs. When the foundation is inconsistent, so is everything built on top of it. Arguments become emotional shortcuts. Evidence becomes flexible. Conclusions are simply recycled tribal preferences dressed up as analysis.

And when logic collapses completely, politics falls back on one of its oldest tricks: Argumentum ad Baculum, the argument from force. The force can be social pressure, media noise, political punishment or simple intimidation. It stops being “my reasoning holds” and turns into “I can make it costly for you to disagree”.

So the debates continue, fueled by confidence rather than clarity, noise rather than nuance.

And in the end, you are left with the most predictable outcome of all: When nothing is shared, nothing can be solved. And when facts cannot win on structure, opinions win by default.