I see DougR is still around and kicking. Consensus does not mean "total agreement." It means a larger group than any other group that happens to be out there. A plurality exists as far as the types of opinions, but a larger number seems to give Truman the benefit of the doubt than the preferences of the various others of us who have other opinions. What's so hard to figure about that?

Plurality voting is our current system. Each voter votes for one candidate, and the candidate with the plurality (most votes) wins, regardless of whether that candidate gets a majority or not. In a plurality election with N candidates, a candidate can theoretically win with just over 1/N of the votes. The larger the number of candidates, [or in this case, opinions] the smaller the percentage of the votes needed to win. Plurality voting is perfectly adequate when only two candidates are running, but it cannot effectively and fairly accomodate more than two viable candidates. This fact is known as "Duverger's Law," and it explains why the US political system is a two-party duopoly without effective competition from other parties.

That about sums it up for this discussion also. Though there are many views, it seems always to boil down to just a couple. So recognizing a plurality is necessary to understand my use of concensus. To quote from another site (NIH), a consensus statement provides a "snapshot in time" of the state of knowledge of the conference topic. At this point in time, in this group, this is what appears to be the case. Got it? It has nothing to do with the rest of the world. Or anything, really. As several have said, that war is over.

SRS