The truth is that the GOP cannot live forever with lies

Back when the Bush/Cheney/Faux News collaborative venture called the Republican administration created their own reality and assured themselves that they were creating heaven on earth, Stephen Colbert made us laugh our way out by the news that he reconstructed in his show.  In this reconstruction, Colbert invented a word that has also entered popular culture: truthiness.

American television comedian Stephen Colbert coined the word in this meaning^[2] as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd" during the pilot episode of his political satire program The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. By using this as part of his routine, Colbert satirized the misuse of appeal to emotion and "gut feeling" as a rhetorical device in contemporaneous socio-political discourse

So, where from did Colbert get the word?

 Colbert explained the origin of his word as: "Truthiness is a word I pulled right out of my keister".

We all laughed.  It was funny.

Except that it is not funny anymore. In this rapid descent to hell, facts no longer matter.

Facts and truths are fundamental to democracy.

Fights over truth claims are simply the price we have to pay for living in a democracy. By this way of thinking, we are just in a particularly rough patch.

But, the challenge to truth leading to the conclusion that "anything goes" as truth and that any interpretation is as good as another, is a freaky way to live.

Some kinds of truth—think of physics or other “pure” sciences—might be able to survive quite adequately without democracy. However, the best aspects of liberal democracy cannot survive without any commitment to finding some common way of seeing and talking about the world that takes on the imprimatur of truth, at least provisionally.
Truth matters as the foundation for interpersonal trust. It matters because we cannot talk to one another, much less conduct a serious debate, until we share some principles and facts about the world at large, not to mention a consensus on how to generate them. How, for example, can we ever decide on a serious labor policy if we can’t agree on whether the unemployment rate has gone up or down or even on how to figure out how many people are out there looking for work? 

Exactly.  Collective decision making in a democracy, like about unemployment and census, depends on truth.

Recent political developments have made it abundantly clear that 63 million, which includes quite a few "god-fearing" white people, have decided to wage a war on truth itself!

But, history shows that we have been engaged in such a battle like forever.  And, with every new battle, truth always prevails.  So, fight we shall, and win we will.

[NO] matter how treacherous the terrain, we cannot give up on trying, within the framework of pluralism, to find some elemental convictions about the nature of reality that we can hold in common. Our future depends on seeing, as well as living in, a shared world.