We’ve all been there. The family dinner that devolves into shouting. The Facebook thread that spirals into mutual unfriending. The workplace conversation that makes everyone suddenly interested in their phones. We enter these exchanges believing we’re having a rational discussion about policies, facts, or social issues. We leave frustrated, convinced the other side is either cognitively impaired, morally bankrupt, or willfully obtuse.

What if none of those explanations capture what’s really happening? What if political debates remain unresolved not because people are bad at reasoning, but because they’re engaged in fundamentally different types of semantic contests altogether?

This is where contestivism offers a clarifying lens. Rather than treating unresolved political debates as failures of communication or breakdowns in democratic discourse, contestivism recognizes them as inevitable expressions of how human beings assert their right to exist meaningfully in the world. The problem isn’t that we’re debating badly. It’s that we’re not actually debating the same things.

The three-dimensional reality of political contests

Every political statement operates simultaneously across three domains of contestation: epistemic (what’s true), axiological (what’s valuable), and ontological (what’s possible within our understanding of reality). When someone says “We need stricter immigration policies,” they’re not just making a policy proposal. They’re asserting claims about truth (immigration causes specific problems), values (how homogeneous our society should be), and reality itself (what’s possible within their conception of which types of societies thrive).

The person responding with “Immigration enriches our communities” isn’t simply disagreeing with a policy position. They’re contesting across all three domains simultaneously, asserting different truths, different values, and operating from a fundamentally different understanding of social reality. Neither participant recognizes this multi-dimensional structure, so they talk past each other while becoming increasingly frustrated by the other’s apparent inability to “see reason.”

This explains why presenting more facts rarely resolves political disagreements. If the contest is primarily axiological — about what we should value — then additional epistemic claims miss the mark entirely. If the fundamental disagreement is ontological — about what’s possible within different understandings of reality — then both facts and values become irrelevant until that deeper question is addressed.

The illusion of rational policy debate

Most political debates present themselves as epistemic contests. They’re framed as disagreements about facts that could theoretically be resolved through better information or more rigorous analysis. This framing maintains the comfortable fiction that political differences stem from knowledge gaps rather than fundamental incompatibilities in how we understand existence itself.

Consider debates about universal healthcare. Proponents marshal evidence about cost savings, health outcomes, and international comparisons. Opponents cite concerns about government inefficiency, individual responsibility, and economic impacts. Both sides present their cases as fact-based analyses, yet no amount of additional data seems to move the needle.

Through a contestivist lens, this apparent epistemic debate reveals deeper axiological and ontological dimensions. The real contest concerns what we value most deeply: collective care versus individual freedom, systemic solutions versus personal responsibility, the role of government in ensuring wellbeing. More fundamentally, it’s an ontological contest about what kind of beings humans are. Are we cooperative creatures who thrive through mutual support, or independent agents who flourish through personal effort and competition?

Neither side can “win” this debate through better facts because the facts themselves are being filtered through incompatible value systems and worldviews. The evidence that seems compelling to one side appears irrelevant or distorted to the other, not due to cognitive failure, but due to operating from entirely different semantic universes.

Power, being, and the stakes of political contest

Contestivism reveals why political debates feel so existentially charged. Participants are not only advocating for rational policies, they’re also defending their very being by projecting their meaning, their understanding of truth, value and reality, to the broader semantic field. To concede a political point isn’t simply to change one’s mind about a policy question; it’s to risk ontological displacement within the broader meaning economy.

This explains the intensity of political engagement and the seeming irrationality of partisan loyalty. When someone’s fundamental understanding of reality, their core values, and their social positioning are all wrapped up in political identity, challenges to their political positions register as threats to their existence. For someone to shift their political allegiance, they must reconstruct their meanings, their epistemic, axiological, and ontological frameworks of reality.

The stakes become even higher when we consider how political positions function as markers of social belonging. Our political alignments signal to others where we stand in the meaning structure, which communities will recognize us as legitimate members, and what kind of being we claim for ourselves. Political debates thus become contests over recognition, inclusion, and the right to exist meaningfully within our social environments.

Why resolution remains elusive

Political debates remain unresolved because resolution would require one side to undergo fundamental reconstruction of their meaning framework. It’s not a multiple choice question, but a redefinition of what answers are possible within the test. That is an existential undertaking.

Moreover, the recursive nature of contestation means that every political exchange simultaneously reinforces and challenges the broader semantic environment. Even when debates appear to reach temporary resolution through compromise or electoral outcomes, the underlying contestations continue operating beneath the surface. What we interpret as political stability is actually momentary alignment of power configurations that maintain certain meanings in dominant positions while others remain suppressed or marginalized.

This view allows us to see reason in the apparent irrationality of deeply held political convictions.

Beyond pathology: Embracing political contest as human

Rather than treating unresolved political debates as symptoms of democratic dysfunction, contestivism suggests they’re expressions of the fundamental human drive to establish and defend meaning as a condition for existence. The person who seems immune to facts is actually engaging in sophisticated meaning-preservation work that aligns with their mental models of reality.

This doesn’t mean all political positions are equally valid or that truth doesn’t matter. It means that political engagement operates according to contestivist logic, where the primary drive is maintaining viable being through the assertion and defense of meaning systems. Understanding this dynamic offers more productive approaches to political engagement than the traditional model of rational debate between competing policy proposals. In this case, rationalism becomes relative — which it has been for a very long time.

Political contests, like all meaning contests, are happening whether we recognize them or not. They’re not peripheral to human social life — they are human social life, playing out in the political arena where power is most explicitly organized and distributed. The sooner we acknowledge this reality, the better equipped we become to navigate the inevitable contestations that define our collective existence.

From a contestivist understanding, the question then shifts from achieving an illusory resolution to meaningful engagement with full awareness of human meaning-making itself.