Pulitzer-prize winning Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote, “Increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth.”
You can’t demand that debate be rational strictly on the basis of the evidence, because that’s not how the public operates.
Which is to say, we’re stuck with us.
Public discourse has changed; information that does not fit one’s worldview is now discounted or rejected.
I think Plato made a somewhat similar argument. As did Francis Bacon, when he said that “the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced.”