Yes, but the implication that feelings and truth are mutually exclusive is often used to bury, dismiss, or invalidate the truths around what feelings people experience, their meaning, importance, and roles in human lives/society.

It’s not about stripping feelings from discovery to arrive at truth, but rather charting the truths that feelings are actually pointing to in order to discover more complete truths.

Argument is a form of communication. And like all forms of communication, there are better and worse ways to do it.

What do you mean by “arguing”?

That’s not a shadow government, that’s just government. They weren’t even trying to be subtle about it.

Yes that is how you get to modern US pre-Trump. There’s still corruption, it’s more hidden, and managed enough that the less marginalized middle/upper class have relative safety/stability. Compare that to the other large economies, it was doing retty well for its size, and certainly much better than centuries past.