In recent days friends who belong to the political right have told me the country may not survive Joe Biden.

And friends on the left like to remind me that they were right — Donald Trump was an existential threat. They say that if Trump makes a comeback, or Trumpers gain a majority in the Congress or retake the White House, it’s all over for our country.

I think it will take more than one man or one election to kill our system of liberty.

But I do think both tribes are dangerous, because, for both, ideology overwhelms fact and reason. Indeed, both deny and redefine reality to suit the tropes of the cult.

A few examples:

1. COVID is fake news, or, now, exaggerated and the vaccine is as dangerous, or more dangerous, than the disease.

How many people actually believe this and how many say it simply to affirm membership in the tribe?

Who knows?

It’s like members of a team telling each other they really outplayed the team that won.

The problem comes with the constant repetition of the trope, which becomes hypnotic and a prophylactic against reality itself.

2. Eventually we reach the point of people saying “its not raining outside because I say it is not.” Thus, “climate change is overblown”— even this summer when it is knocking on our doors.

The climate follows a “1,000-year cycle,” I heard from a denier the other day. If so, the cycle has been broken.

3. The election was stolen.

This is proof that the big lie, if repeated enough, in the echo chamber, to bobbing heads and by people eager for acceptance, will displace plain sense and sight.

The left, for its part, denied the legitimacy of Donald Trump after the 2016 election.

We don’t accept a victory by the other team anymore. We have made sore losing an anti-democratic norm.

4. It was not an insurrection.

Folks keep telling me the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was a mere “riot.”

And why is that?

For various reasons. They say:

Most of the rioters were not armed.

Most didn’t know what their plan, or their leader’s plan, was.

None were part of a specific, actual plot to topple the government.

This seems like a desperate attempt at redefinition to me.

Whatever word or words you use to characterize Jan. 6, it was an unpardonable disgrace.

And I don’t think there is any doubt that members of Congress or the vice president could have been injured or killed, if the mob had found one of them.

Would that have been an insurrection?

The mob didn’t get to the Speaker or the Veep, thanks to the Capitol police force, members of which were and remain so traumatized that four have committed suicide in the time since Jan. 6.

George F. Will has said that Jan. 6, 2021, should be like Sept. 11, 2011, or Dec. 7, 1941 – “a day that shall live in infamy.”

And he is right.

Saying Jan. 6 was “only a riot” is like saying 9/​11 or Pearl Harbor were “incidents.”

5. Wearing masks does nothing. (Or, there is little evidence that they help much.) They are mostly a matter of virtue signaling. This is the Rand Paul line. But, even if you conclude that masks are only marginally helpful, they are one tool in a limited arsenal. And the tribal imperative is not just to deny or negate one tool but

This is how ideology, even dime-store ideology, works: You can’t take issues, or policies or people, one by one. You must embrace the entire company line: Swallow the myth sandwich whole. Thus, if a mask is not that useful, it must be also be true that a vaccine, Dr. Fauci or social distancing are all to be doubted or dismissed.

6. Wearing a mask, even when not required to, is a sign of superior understanding and concern.

People on the left are ideological completists, just like the right. You have to take the whole package. If you hate Trump and read books, it follows that you will wear a mask even when jogging alone in a park.

7. Science will save us — follow it.

This is a favorite mantra of the left.

But it is a fundamental misunderstanding of science, which cannot be political and must be empirical. Science must go where investigation and evidence lead. It cannot be static, join a side or provide answers.

8. America is a racist country.

This is the ultimate delusion of “right thinking people” and, for reasons that I cannot fathom, it makes the sisters and brothers of the left feel good.

In reality, the United States is the most consciously idealistic and intentionally self-correcting nation in the history of the world.

And no nation has made as much progress in civil rights as we have in the last 75 years.

9. American society is post racial, and there is no longer any real discrimination.

This is just ignorance — the view of folks who don’t know many people or don’t get out much.

If this summer was the wake-up call on global warming, last summer was on race and police brutality. The whole country saw the murder of George Floyd.

The truth is that there is a blow-back of bigotry of all kinds, including anti-gay bigotry, right now, as the great civil rights leader Andrew Young recently said. People feel they have been liberated — by the internet, by hate sites on it and by the far right — to say, and advocate, anything they want.

10. Canceling someone is just part of the cost of social progress.

No, it is bullying and censorship.

This is the left at its worst: We have to stop hate speech by stopping anything that can be construed or misinterpreted as hate speech.

Indeed, we will stop hate by policing speech and prosecuting and persecuting anyone not ideologically pure enough.

So if you don’t join the shouts of the angriest people on the Black Lives Matter march, or if, God help you, you voted for Donald Trump, you are “complicit.” And you are a bigot.

Likewise, if you are a Republican or an evangelical Christian, you are probably also a white supremacist.

This is sophisticated hate and not so sophisticated fascism.

Much, if not most, of the left no longer believes in free speech and free thought.

11. Identity should trump biology.

Maybe in an individual life, not in public policy. A biological male who identifies otherwise ought not to be allowed to run on a women’s track team. It’s not fair or honorable. He/​she has a right to his/​her decision but also an obligation to accept the consequences of his/​her decision.

12. The left will destroy the country.

Or the right will.

We are back to where we started.

I say the country is bigger and stronger than its many historical superstitions and paranoias.

The left will bully and continue to erode free speech. But more and more Americans will wake up and say “no.”

The far right will continue to attack fact, data and compromise until enough politicians stand up to the GOP base and the mob within the base.

You have to have a little faith — in the system the Founders made and in the country itself.

Keith C. Burris is the former editor, vice president and editorial director of Block Newspapers (burriscolumn@gmail.com).

First Published: September 12, 2021, 9:00 a.m.