Reality Has a Liberal Bias. Here’s Why

In a world wracked by massive inequality, catastrophic climate change, and galloping technological upheaval, the facts are not “neutral.”

They aren’t “both sides.” Over and over, facts side with progress, justice, and scientific understanding: in other words, reality leans liberal, and denial is the real partisan act.

+

Science and Empiricism: The Liberal Arena

When conservatives deny climate change, refuse the evidence on gun violence, or push abstinence-only sex education that fails by every measurable metric, they aren’t just expressing opinions. They are attacking reality itself. The facts are clear:

Human activity is warming the planet, causing droughts, floods, and wildfires at unprecedented rates. Every national academy of science on the planet, every reputable climate scientist, and every scrap of honest data agree. Who lobbies against solutions? Not progressives.

Comprehensive sex education works. Abstinence-only “values” fail. The evidence, tested worldwide, shatters conservative dogma.

Gun control saves lives. More guns, less crime? Flatly disproved by data—from Australia to Japan to the UK.

These are not “liberal facts.” They are facts that happen to put right-wing dogma to shame. To accept the truth is not “liberal bias.” It’s maturity.

+

Social Progress and Justice: The Facts Are In

History is a never-ending catalogue of conservative resistance to progress—and of the inevitable, liberating victory of truth:

Segregation, misogyny, and homophobia were all defended as “tradition,” “values,” or “nature.” Liberals and progressives fought to demonstrate, with evidence, the harm these systems did, and marched with facts—for desegregation, women’s suffrage, marriage equality, disability rights.

The conservative insistence on “colorblindness” ignores the mountains of evidence about the realities of systemic racism and how it perpetuates inequality in education, justice, and economics.

Economic policy? Democratic and progressive policies—from the New Deal to the Affordable Care Act—have expanded access, grown the middle class, and reduced poverty, while trickle-down austerity has failed for everyone but the rich.

It is not “biased” to note these outcomes. It is simply stating what reality already decided.

+

Conservatism: The Politics of Denial

Modern conservatism is built on a refusal to face facts—willful ignorance of science, statistics, and cause-and-effect. From creationism in schools to the denial of voter suppression, the right rejects not just policy, but observable reality.

The right’s war on public education, its attacks on journalists and whistleblowers, and its crusades against academic independence are not signs of a “different way of knowing.” They are outright assaults on the mechanisms we use to find out what’s true.

If that’s your politics—if you must silence scientists, suppress evidence, and shout down dissent—then you are not just anti-liberal, you are anti-reality.

+

Liberalism: The Home for Truth

Progressivism is not perfect. But it is, fundamentally, the only political philosophy committed to figuring out what works—by asking, testing, listening, and changing. Liberal democracy creates spaces for correction.

Conservatives may sneer at “changing one’s mind,” but that’s exactly what progress, and truth, demand.

Every major step forward in human welfare—vaccines, civil rights, environmental protection, equal marriage—came over the objections of conservative “wisdom.”

As the arc of history bends forward, it doesn’t just bend toward justice—it bends toward reality, shining a brutal light on the fantasies and failures of those who try to wish the world away.

+

Reality has a liberal bias—not because liberals own the facts, but because our values align with what the world actually is: diverse, complicated, full of change, and demanding of justice. If your worldview can’t handle that, it’s not reality that’s biased. It’s you.