the story of people failing to account for compelling evidence is by itself a familiar, >ubiquitous, low-status specimen of political propaganda.

In fact, one of the most frequent arguments you encounter as you read political >discussions is the argument that the other side are ignoring obvious facts, and so >failing to behave rationally, because they're blinded by their ideology. To a first >approximation, everyone believes that about everyone else.

It seems to me that many of the arguments made on this site based on or referring to the Politics is the Mind-Killer article are based on extrapolations from a single well-known highly-polarized (essentially) 2-party system, i.e. the USA.

I am from a country with many political parties. No party ever gets more than 50% of the votes, in fact it is rare for any party to get over 20% of the votes. The parties are always forced to form a coalition to make a majority government. This system is not without its flaws, and far be it from me to argue that it is superior to the American system.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that many of the failure modes of 'politics', as often described of this site, are actually failure modes of present-day American politics, and not of politics in general.

For example, I encounter the argument described above, that "other side are ignoring obvious facts, and so failing to behave rationally, because they're blinded by their ideology" very rarely, even in political discussions. Politicians saying such things would find it hard to negotiate with other politicians to form a government, and are mostly smart enough to not say such things. They would have no difficulty admitting that other politicians/parties behave differently simply because they have different goals (they represent the interests of a different set of voters), while still acting on almost the same set of evidence.