Selective use of facts

Oliver Burkemann has an insightful piece in today's Guardian. He makes the important point that the country is divided by two incompatible versions of reality, where the same facts take on completely different meanings.

The divide between Bushlandia and the rest of America - or, more generally, between the president's core supporters and everyone else - is not a question of mere policy arguments. It is a clash of two incompatible versions of reality, where the same facts take on completely different meanings. For Idaho Republicans, escalating violence in Iraq illustrates precisely the scale of the challenge there, and the consequent need to stay loyal. Mr Bush's errors, meanwhile, are not an argument for his removal so much as a sign of his human fallibility. "You go into something like Iraq, nobody can know how it's going to turn," Governor Risch said. "People say Saddam was terrible because he tortured his people, now Bush is awful because he invaded. Well, which do you want?"

Perhaps his best example of this comes earlier in the article, where he quotes Idaho's Republican Governor commenting on the Katrina disaster:

"Here in Idaho, we couldn't understand how people could sit around on the kerbs waiting for the federal government to come and do something. We had a dam break in 1976, but we didn't whine about it. We got out our backhoes and we rebuilt the roads and replanted the fields and got on with our lives. That's the culture here. Not waiting for the federal government to bring you drinking water. In Idaho there would have been entrepreneurs selling the drinking water."

While it is certainly true that the two sides of the political spectrum look at the same facts and come to completely different conclusions, there seems to be a very selective use of facts for the Bushlandiers (and, perhaps for liberals as well). For example, the governor's comment about entrepreneurs selling drinking water seems to miss these rather important facts:

1. There was no potable drinking water available nearby (apart from bottled water in stores that were closed up -- hence the "looting.")

2. Entrepreneurs were prevented from bringing water to the city from outside by FEMA, which closed public access to the city on the few roads that weren't underwater, gasoline supplies were interrupted, and a host of similar difficulties. In fact, there were any number of stories of volunteers trying to bring help (for free) who were turned away by FEMA agents.

3. The hurricane struck at the end of the month before pay day for most of the city's poorer residents who consequently had little or no money to spend to buy drinking water.

It seems to me that taking those facts into consideration is rather important in forming a judgment whether the federal government should have had an important role to play in saving the city.

Frankly, I'd like to see how well the people who make comments like this would have fared if they had been among those stranded at the Convention Center in New Orleans after the storm.

It seems to me this selective use of facts is a key element of the ideology on the right. In fact, what it suggests is that the fact-based explanations for the positions these people take are an after-thought. They are not the basis for the belief, they are the after-the-fact rationalization of the belief. The belief came first, and the rationalization is developed later by picking and choosing among the facts most likely to support the belief.

I'm sure this goes on to a degree on the left as well, but it seems to me to be ubiquitous on the far right.