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Notes -
There are committed conflict theorists on both sides, yeah. And they're the loudest voices. But why would they bother with arguments-as-soldiers if no one could be convinced by arguments? I think there are reasonable people whose opinions can be swayed by fact -- I'd like to think I'm one of them -- and, while the information environment for any politically contentious topic tends to be bad, it's not completely intractable.
How large that population is is an open question, and, I imagine, membership is rather fuzzy: there's a wide range of cognitive biases towards preserving one's existing beliefs that mistake theorists can fall prey to, and extreme conflict theory -- on the level of fabricating evidence to support policies you know don't help your cause -- might just be the endpoint of that spectrum. But I can't think of an easy way to determine the shape of that distribution, so maybe it really is mostly conflict theorists. But I don't think so.
Orwell explains this with the word "duckspeak":
The arguments are source material for the duckspeak.
The main arguments which actually work are the the argument from personal benefit, argument from authority, and the argument from force. Including social approval and disapproval for those last two.
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