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"Effectiveness of policy" is the last thing that political disagreements are about. If you listed all the causes of political conflict in order of importance and relevance, "effectiveness of policy" would rank around... 67th place? Maybe?
Political conflicts arise because of clashes between incommensurate value systems, misalignment of tribal interests, the competing demands of heterogeneous subjectivities, emotional biases both conscious and unconscious... if political conflicts could be settled through rational argumentation then people would have done so already.
Of course people will still try to convince themselves that politics is really about "policy", for various reasons. It could be because they're classical liberals who recognize that liberalism needs to postulate a universal, expansive, and malleable blank slate core as part of human nature in order for liberalism to function at large scales over long periods of time. Or it could be because they find the idea of human subjectivity to be intrinsically uncomfortable, and a world of rational information-processing agents is more amenable to their tastes. Whatever the reason.
The sooner you adjust your frame of reference, the sooner things will start making sense.
Well yeah that's the point. Changing stances on policy at the drop of a dime doesn't reflect people wanting things they actually believe are good for the country and our future, but tribalist emotional based thinking around personal moral disputes rather than national health.
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