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sweeping assessment of any individual or group we regard as the opposition. In the course of working on this book, I spoke with a left-wing lawyer who described growing up in a politically progressive environment and then attending a liberal (in every sense) arts college. As a consequence, she told me, “it wasn’t until I went to Yale Law School that I met people I disagreed with, ideologically, who were incredibly smart. This is going to sound ridiculous, but it wasn’t until then that I realized that conservatives could be intelligent.” It would be nice if that statement did sound ridiculous, but we hear variations on it so often that this one scarcely registers as surprising (except, perhaps, in its forthrightness). Think, for instance, of the countless times we say things like “what kind of idiot could actually believe…”

One of the most common answers to that question is: the wicked kind. This is the Evil Assumption—the idea that people who disagree with us are not ignorant of the truth, and not unable to comprehend it, but have willfully turned their backs on it. The Evil Assumption has a longstanding relationship with religion, where “unbeliever” is all but synonymous with “evildoer.” But it is almost equally common in politics. In The Prelude, the poet William Wordsworth acidly described the French Revolution as a cause that, ostensibly, “no one could stand up against, / who was not lost, abandoned, selfish, proud, / mean, miserable, willfully depraved, / hater perverse of equity and truth.” (Wordsworth was largely condemning his own doctrinaire past; the poem is subtitled Growth of a Poet’s Mind.) As those lines suggest, clashes of belief that engender violent conflict are especially good at provoking the Evil Assumption. And, conversely, the Evil Assumption is especially good at provoking violent conflict. (If beliefs have consequences, consider the likely consequences of believing that those who disagree with you are wicked.) But those who disagree with you don’t have to reject your God or threaten your life for you to conclude that they are depraved. These days, you can’t punch the scan button on your radio without coming across an invocation of the Evil Assumption: hosts or guests or callers describing their ideological opponents as morally depraved reprobates bent on the destruction of civilization as we know it.

That’s quite a charge to lay at the feet of people who don’t agree with us. And yet it has a certain dark logic, given our tendency to confuse our models of reality with reality itself. Think about the accusation that people who disagree with us “don’t live in the real world.” What we really mean is that they don’t live in our model of the world; they don’t share our vision of how things are. By failing to see the world as we do, they actually are undermining its reality and threatening its destruction—at least, unto us. But, of course, we are doing the same to them. Implicitly or explicitly, we are denying that they possess the same intellectual and moral faculties that we do—and denying, too, the significance and value of their life experiences, from which, inevitably, many of their beliefs arise.

Of these three assumptions—the Ignorance Assumption, the Idiocy Assumption, and the Evil Assumption—the last is the most disturbing. But the first is the most decisive. We assume that other people are ignorant because we assume that we are not; we think we know the facts, and (as the ’Cuz It’s True Constraint mandates) we think those facts determine our beliefs. Put differently, we think the evidence is on our side. It is almost impossible to overstate the centrality of that conviction to everything this book is about, which is why we are going to turn next to the topic of evidence. Our faith in our own reading of the facts undergirds our certainty that we are right, our shock when we turn out to be wrong, and our willingness to deny the perspicacity, intelligence, and moral worth of everyone who disagrees with us.

What is alarming is how naturally this cascade of assumptions comes to us—and not just to