Politicians who give away the taxpayers' money to social programs will be lionized in the media for their "compassion." But many businessmen across the country, who each donate millions of dollars of their own money to help the less fortunate, get no such praise, if they are mentioned at all.
Facts don't matter to those for whom principles don't matter, however loudly those principles may be proclaimed. Many so-called "thinking people" do remarkably little thinking.
Much ingenuity may go into articulating and rationalizing their attitudes toward business, the police, American society, etc., but these are still attitudes rather than principles.
This is not to say that there is no consistency in their behavior. There is great consistency but it is consistency with a particular vision of the world rather than consistency with proclaimed principles of safety, equality, or morality.
That vision casts them in the role of wiser and nobler people -- defenders of the downtrodden, protectors of the environment, advocates of peace and opponents of war. There is always some crusade that requires their superior wisdom and virtue to be imposed on others.
Particular attitudes towards particular things that happen to be in vogue among those who wrap themselves in the mantle of chic virtue serve as a badge of identity, showing who is one of the special Us rather than the more ordinary Them.
This is heady stuff and they are not going to give it up for anything so mundane as facts or logic or principles. The best that the rest of us can do is to stop calling their ego trips idealism.