Please ask me what my "best interests" are.

[sahel]

53. Last things first

I must confess I googled "Ben Carson black support" and clicked on the first link that came up (https://www.isidewith.com/poll/631968041/290416960) which quoted his black support at 37%. In fact his campaign today claims black support at somewhere between 17 and 18 percent. I am happy to walk that claim back.

So then we do know what the primary self-interest of many Kentuckians was, right?

Do we? LBJ had the same problem with Kentuckians after he launched his fabled "war on poverty" whilst standing on a sagging Appalachian front porch. While his civil rights and desegregation progress resulted in an almost immediate hike in black support, his great society legislation did nothing to shore things up with poor whites. Even after delivering benefits to them, he got barely a vote in the whole paddock. Its a phenomenon that public choice theorists have called the "ungrateful electorate dilemma".

perhaps the ability to attain and maintain pleasure or to attain instant gratification outweighs the more rational and painstaking value in those instances

Definitely. Racial/national/sectarian issues always trump economics in the minds of voters, pound for pound. Lenin once theorised that World War II could never happen because the French and German soldiers would refuse to fight each other in a show of working class solidarity. We all know how that turned out. There is something primal and atavistic about national/racial/tribal/sectarian solidarity, once that takes over bread-and-butter issues can go hang.

And I certainly don't recommend "talking down to anyone". Poor whites from Kentucky, West Virginia, etc, are extremely sensitive about being dissed. There are parallels with Black people, I think. Michele Wallace once said that the Black man clings to his swagger, his cult of machismo, because the White man has left him with precious little else. The hillbillies fix their own cars, brew their own liquor and shoot their own game with their own guns because all they have left is their self-image of rugged independence. Obama said something to that effect, that they cling to their "guns and their religion" because it is the only semblance of their collective manhood that they have left. Is it any great surprise that they choose to identify in that way, rather than as beneficiaries of a certain welfare policy or another?

Of course, no one likes to get a free personality assessment from someone of another race. The hillbillies didn't like getting it from Obama and neither do Black people like it coming from white people. It is what it is.