Why Do Working Class People Vote Against Their Economic Interests?

[laureloak]

"AUBURN, Ala. — In a state where intellectuals are generally scorned as “elitists” — or as former governor and presidential candidate George Wallace liked to call them for his own opportunistic political reasons, “pointy-headed liberals” — retired Auburn History professor Wayne Flynt is one expert who is widely known around Alabama. He is someone who people seem to listen to, at least those who pay attention.

Since moving back to my home state and city a few years ago after many years of chasing a journalism career and then an academic career elsewhere, and struggling to figure out what’s wrong with this place, a key question comes up over and over again in conversation. No one seem to have a simple, satisfying answer.

Why do working class people in the South so frequently vote against their own economic self-interest?"


http://blog.locustfork.net/2011/06/why-do-working-class-people-vote-against-their-economic-interests/

[GreenStormCloud]

1. Economics aren't the only things people are interested in. Duh! N/T

[laureloak]

3. Read the article. It's about MUCH more than economics.

[izquierdista]

2. When they are given other targets...

Like gays, or Muslins, or abortion clinics, or ACORN to get worked up about, it's very easy to pick their pocket.

[RZM]

4. Social issues matter

Just look around here and see how much they matter to liberals. Same goes for the other side.

[reformist2]

6. Yep. It's God, gays, welfare and abortion.

If these issues were taken off the table, I'm convinced Democrats would win most elections with 75% of the vote.

[RZM]

9. Perhaps

But those issues are just as important to many people as economic issues are. Even more so in some cases, so they are never coming off of the table.

That was part of my point earlier. Sometimes we hear that conservatives are 'hoodwinked' into voting on issues like guns, god, and gays, as if those issues are some sort of smoke and mirrors thing (not saying you are implying that). Truth is, as much as I don't like conservative positions on most social issues, I at least recognize that many people on the other end care about them just as much as people here on DU do. Not everybody, of course, but I've never bought this idea that these issues are mainly distractions. Sometimes they are, but quite often not.

Years ago I knew a woman who was an incredibly devout Catholic. She cared about abortion more than anything and was very active in the anti-abortion scene . . . she was always talking about going to protests, writing her elected reps, etc. For her, nothing mattered more and while I disagreed with her views on the subject, I could certainly see that her position on abortion was at the core of her identity and reflected her most important and cherished beliefs. Without the issue she might have been a Dem voter, but at the same time she also wouldn't be herself without the issue either.

[lapislzi]

5. Two words: wedge issues

As long as the politics of divisiveness are in play, working people will turn out in their droves to defend their god and their guns against teh gays, teh liberals, and anyone who doesn't look like them.

[QC]

17. Wedge issues are most powerful when they are the only real difference

between the parties, as is the case now, when both parties mostly agree on economics--so-called "free trade," banker bailouts, and the like.

[MattBaggins]

7. Because you can hire one half of the working class

to kill the other half.

People want a scapegoat or a Goldstein to direct their hate at. It's easy to direct blue collar frustration at each other rather than the people actually responsible for it.

[kctim]

8. Simple

They place their individual rights and freedoms ahead of their economic desires.

[laureloak]

13. But they're giving up their rights and freedoms to corporations.

[kctim]

18. Government is the ONLY entity

with the power to take away individual rights and freedoms. Granted, some corps use government to try and do so in order to enhance the bottom line.

The problem is that rather than fight for ALL rights, people pick and choose which rights they will defend or give up. They then go on to falsely believe that they know what is best for others and this creates the division our country now faces.

[newspeak]

19. so Little Boots basically pissed on the constitution

oh, except for the second amendment. Illegal wiretapping, suspending habeas corpus, but they still think their freedom loving, liberty kind of people. Unless it's snooping on other people's lives and rights that they don't agree with.

The corporate media with their talking head fabricators, have repeated over and over again how government is bad, businesses are good. And, if you don't have a job or have a decent job it's all your fault. Those minorities, illegals, person making more than you, it's all their fault. That government should not regulate businesses. Businesses are so honest that they can police themselves, and if they kill or bilk a thousand people, well they will just die, instead of resurrecting like a phoenix under another name.

And any form of assistance is bad, because THOSE people are all lazy or weak and they just need to die off to "decrease the surplus population." After all, it's God's will.

[laureloak]

10. Preachers partly to blame .... from the article

“It’s partly because preachers tell them that the Democratic Party is a godless party,” Flynt said. “It’s party because the Democratic Party is made up of a large number of African-Americans, and working class whites just won’t vote that way.”

If you go back and take a look at the history before the 1960s, Dr. Flynt said, you won’t find much discussion in families of such social wedge issues as birth control, abortion, prayer in the schools, obscenity in the media, gay rights, etc.

[laureloak]

11. Religious intolerance....from the article

“If you are a truck diver, a plumber, an electrician or a steel worker and you live in Alabama, you say, ‘Well, I think my religion is the way everybody ought to think,” Dr. Flynt said. But, “let that same guy move to Salt Lake City, Utah (where the majority is Mormon) or New Jersey or Connecticut (where the majority is Catholic) or Dearborn, Michigan, (where the majority is Muslim), and he won’t think so highly of the idea that the majority of people ought to impose their religious values on the minority.”

[laureloak]

12. "hard" support for republicans....from the article

Dr. Flynt says the political problem working people face is what he calls “hard support” for Republican and conservative politics, “from an awful lot of traditional power elites and lobbyist groups in Alabama (like ALFA, the old Farmers Bureau, now an insurance company), and individual voters.

“They don’t want to pay taxes. They don’t care about public schools,” he said. “They particularly don’t want to pay for black kids in public schools. They are not going to subsidize schools in Birmingham, Huntsville, Montgomery and Mobile, in the inner-city. And they are certainly not going to support schools in the Black Belt, where virtually all the kids are black.”

“Well, this is absolutely suicidal,” Dr. Flynt said. “Because white people are not having children. People of color are having children.”

Already, he said, 54 percent of the kids in public schools are on programs for free and reduced-priced meals. By about the year 2017, a majority of kids in public schools will be children of color. Nationally, they already are: US Census Shows Whites No Longer Have Majority of Babies.

“If you don’t educate them you’ve got no future in this state,” Dr. Flynt said. “You might as well move to Connecticut or Washington State or somewhere else. There is no future in the global economy for Alabama if you are not going to support the schools.”

[laureloak]

14. Corruption of the court system ... from the article.

"One of the problems that results from decades of conservative voting by poor people and the working middle class is a corruption of the court system, which now slants in favor of corporations even at the highest level, the United States Supreme Court, because Republican presidents appoint conservative judges. In last year’s ruling in Citizens United vs. the FCC, the court reversed 100 years of American law. There have been limits on corporate contributions for that long, but not anymore. The high court removed those limits on First Amendment free speech grounds, but also talked about the role of unions in countering corporate influence on politics and government.

What that decision did, Dr. Flynt acknowledged, “was to load the political culture of the United States against working class people, because corporations have huge amounts of money and their leadership just decide how it’s going to be spent.”

“Unions,” on the other hand, he said, “have small and declining amounts of money to invest in politics, and they are going to be simply overwhelmed by what happens.”

[QC]

15. Neither party strongly represents their economic interests,

but the Republicans at least pretend (and pretend is the operative word here) to respect their values.

Let's not forget that a Democrat pushed through the first of the "free trade" agreements that created the shuttered textile and light manufacturing plants you see all over the small-town South. NAFTA devastated those many towns where the main employer in town was a small facility that made, say, blue jeans or lawnmowers or appliances. (I use those examples because I am connected to towns where exactly that happened--Lee Jeans, Briggs and Stratton, and Whirlpool packed up and went to Mexico.)

If we talk to actual members of the working class (few of whom post here) we will find that some really are brainwashed Glenn Beck cultists, and they do vote, but most will tell you that neither party cares about working people. The latter, of course, tend not to vote. Nobody really gives them a reason to.

[Zoeisright]

16. Because they're hateful bigots.

Hating and judging are more important to them than anything.

Besides, they firmly believe that, in spite of no education and no skills, they too will be millionaires one day.

[LeftinOH]

20. Because "baby killing", "communism", "atheism/Islam", and "homos" sound like bad things,

therefore, a vote for the candidate who is against any or all of those things (and it's usually all of them at once) is the one who gets the vote. Simple is as simple does!

[undeterred]

21. Please tell me who cares about my economic interests.