It's been a while since I read it, but don't quite a lot of people go along with it?

It takes a child to point it out, because everyone else is bought in to assuming the king couldn't be so foolish, so they must be mistaken.

Sorry, what I meant was this: after the child pointed it out, everyone acknowledged the truth.

What these disastrous last 5 years have proven is that people will refuse to acknowledge the obvious truth as long as there's a plausible lie they prefer.

To follow up: it was hard enough for the two parties to agree on policy when they couldn't agree on the impact of those policies. How do you predict the second and third order impact of a new law?

Now the parties, or at least their supporters, can't agree on the past and present truth of what's happening in the country.

When there's no common agreement on what basic truth is, you can't expect agree on policy to address the problems we face.