My experience is that most people have issues they're irrational on, and the average person does rationality pretty poorly. Doesn't stop them from going all out with rhetoric about rationality though. There are certain things that are only said when false. "I am a rational person" is one of them.
It's because the government teaches that logic sucks/is boring (when of course, once you get the hang of it, rationality is
incredibly fun).
I remember at my high school you had to take the debate class before you could join the debate club. I took this class (ended up dropping it), and discovered that their solution to the quandary of pretending to teach debate without actually doing so was to force every student to spend basically the first two weeks in the library nonstop, doing pointless "research" for the sole purpose of deterring anybody interesting from actually wanting to continue on. Future politicians ready to "win" "debates" using a truckload of irrelevant "facts", sure, but genuinely passionate, motivated, interesting people? Well, they're dangerous. Gotta deter 'em. Sure enough, basically everybody dropped (and continues to drop) that class, except for the aforementioned future politicians. Needless to say, the debates are incredibly lifeless, uninspiring, unconvincing, and wholly, utterly noncontroversial (and therefore valueless).
Of course, in the real world, positions derive from philosophy and reason, and
then research follows (when/if necessary) to find facts to support the conclusions reached philosophically.
You might win a stilted political debate with an overabundance of BS "data", but you'll never change hearts and minds without a foundation in reason and philosophy.
Facts without this foundation serve nobody but the choir-preacher. But, of course, this is what government wants: choir-preaching politicians to maintain the status quo.