Voting against your own interest
November 5, 2011 Leave a comment
- #1: Voting against your own interest
- Have you ever heard this kind of musing before? The idea is that Republicans exploit social “wedge issues” like gun ownership or gay marriage to get lower-income conservatives to vote against their own self-interest. And that is supposed to be to get government to take money from rich people and dole it back to the poor masses of which they are a part.
- I was reminded of this trope while listening to Michael Medved interview Corey Robin about his new book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Robin himself used the worn line about voting against self-interest, and it recalled the spirit of the 2006 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?
- I wonder if the people who say or write those things are ever conscious of how presumptuous they sound. Somehow, they know what you should objectively be voting for, and you are just duped by your blind passions. Not a very charitable view of a fellow citizen. Worse than the attitude though is their ignorance of the fact that redistribution schemes, whether born of a patronizing benevolence or a covetous “self-interest” of the masses, do not benefit the targets of socio-political largesse but only beget greater misery for everyone in the society.
About Lewis W
Cogitating Duck 