“Respectfully, I wanted to say to them, I live on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. I am on the winning side of capitalism. I work for HBO, corporate America. The Man has been good to me. You, on the other hand, are driving a truck that says, “Obama is a socialist idiot,” and you’re in a much lower tax bracket than most of the people in Manhattan that are voting for Obama. So the times I would actually get into it would be like, “OK, explain to me why you think he’s an idiot. He’s trying to give you a tax cut. You understand you’re voting against your own self-interest?””— Alexandra Pelosi, talking about her new documentary, “Right America: Feeling Wronged”
There is a notion, popularized perhaps by Thomas Frank, that working class Republicans crazily vote against their self-interest. Can’t you see, Democrats seem to implore, our tax policies and entitlement programs benefit you and fleece the rich? Be selfish when you vote!—they urge. This is a bit of a confusing message from Democrats, however, since people like Barack Obama decry those who would claim selfishness as a virtue.
What’s strange about Pelosi’s quote is her seemingly implicit acceptance of the notion that rich Manhattanites are voting against their own self-interests, presumably as a matter of conscience. She doesn’t allow for the possibility that Republicans might choose conscience over wallet too. But what’s worse, I would argue, is that she doesn’t allow for the possibility that she may be miscalculating everyone’s interests. If blue states seem to vote against their own interests and red states seem to do the same, then hardly anyone seems to be voting selfishly at all. And though there are many conclusions we might draw from this, I’d argue that the most likely is that our identification of the voters’ interests is fundamentally flawed.
My problem isn’t when people vote against their self-interests. As you point out, the only person who can identify the self-interests of an individual is the individual themselves. My problem is when people keep voting for a party that hasn’t shown them any results. Republicans have been bringing out their base with abortion horror stories in every election of the past 25 years, but have they actually made any progress in ban choice completely? Maybe in a few spots here and there, but not really any to speak of. What about getting prayer back into schools? I guess they’ve kept their promise about protecting the 2nd amendment, but there hasn’t really been much of an attack on that in quite a while, so that’s not so hard.
There’s nothing wrong with putting your conscience ahead of your pocketbook when choosing who to vote for, but when the people you elect don’t really do anything in service of either, it’s hard to understand why you would keep voting for them.
3 years ago