In December 1770, a young Boston lawyer stood up in court to defend the most hated men in Massachusetts: British soldiers who had fired into a crowd of his own neighbors. John Adams took the case because he believed even the despised deserved a defense grounded in evidence, and in his closing argument he gave the English language one of its most durable sentences: facts are stubborn things. Whatever our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, he told the jury, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
Adams was not being noble in the abstract. He was making a practical claim about how a free society has to work. Self-government asks ordinary people to make decisions — about budgets, wars, schools, laws — and every one of those decisions is downstream of a factual question. What does the program cost? Is the water safe? Did the policy work? Citizens who cannot get true answers are not really governing themselves; they are guessing.
This is why the argument for truth in public life belongs to no party. Two centuries after Adams, American politics compressed the same idea into a maxim made famous by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. (The full record: financier Bernard Baruch said a version of it in 1946, James Schlesinger sharpened the phrasing in 1975, and Moynihan — a Democrat quoting men who served Republican administrations — made it proverbial. The maxim's own pedigree is bipartisan.) Opinions are where democratic life is supposed to disagree — passionately, permanently. Facts are the shared table the disagreement happens on. Saw the table's legs off and the argument doesn't get fairer; it just stops being an argument and becomes a contest of volume.
The people who built constitutional government understood they were building an error-correcting machine: free presses to surface facts, courts to test them, elections to act on them. Every part of that machine assumes the parts feed each other true information. It is the assumption so basic it rarely gets written down — which is why it is worth writing down.