January 6 committee is testing whether Americans can still agree on a shared reality

With the powerful case it has assembled against former President Donald Trump, the bipartisan House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection may provide the clearest -- and potentially most ominous -- measure yet available of how completely red and blue America have separated into divergent information bubbles that no longer share even the most rudimentary agreement on the basic facts of American life.

"This will tell us something that we don't know right now: How impenetrable is the tribalism? How locked down is the tribalism?" says Robert P. Jones, founder and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that has extensively studied the relationship between media consumption and political attitudes.

For months, polls have consistently found large numbers of Republicans expressing agreement with propositions that have no basis in fact, including the beliefs that systemic fraud stole the 2020 election from Trump and the January 6 assault was carried out by leftist agitators and Black protesters, not White supremacist groups and Trump supporters. About half or more of GOP voters have described the invasion of the US Capitol in positive terms, such as patriotism or defending freedom, and only a tiny percentage have said Trump deserves blame for the attack.