Spite the vote?

[Jim Warren]

From the alternative New York Press, Mark Ames with an idea on a puzzlement that has eluded me for a long time.


http://www.nypress.com/17/23/news&columns/MarkAmes.cfm

(snip)
Millions of Americans, particularly white males, don't vote for what's in their so-called best interests. Thomas Frank recently attacked this riddle in his new book What's the Matter with Kansas? but he fails to answer his own question. He can't, in fact, because his is a flawed premise. Frank, who is at his best when he's just vicious, still clings to the comforting theory that Middle Americans are being duped by an evil corporate-political machine that subtly but masterfully manipulates the psychological levers of cultural backlash, implying that if average Americans were left to their own devices, they would somehow make entirely rational, enlightened choices and elect sensible New Deal Democrats every time. This puts Frank in a bind he never quite gets out of. Like all lefties, he is incapable of taking his ruthless analysis beyond a certain point.



The reason is simple. The underlying major premise of humanist-leftist ideology states that people are intrinsically sympathetic. If people are defiantly mean and craven, the humanist-left structure falters. "Why the fuck should I bother fighting for Middle Americans," they ask, "if they're just as loathsome, in their own petty way, as their exploiters, with whom they actively collaborate?"



Rather than grapple with that dilemma, the left pretends it doesn't exist. This is why they will forever struggle to understand the one overriding mystery of why so many working- and middle-class white males vote against their own best interests.

[Pillowbiter]

1. Is it me

or does the writer of this article sound like a "liberal elitist" in his own way.

I think both authors are missing the point.

PB

[Jim Warren]

3. Curious

"I think both authors are missing the point."

Care to elaborate?

[Warpy]

4. They are definitely misreading why Middle America has voted GOP

Middle America votes for the party that at least offers them something. The DLC Democrats have offered them very little: no tax relief, no real enforcement of labor law, no real enforcement of antitrust laws curbing corporate power and the march toward monopoly, no protection of their jobs, no healthcare (they dropped that one in 2000), no nothing! The GOP dangled a tax cut in front of them, so what if it turned out to be a scam? At least the GOP offered that much!

The DLC and New Democrats have given most of us absolutely nothing to vote for, and if Bush weren't giving us something very real to vote against, they'd lose this election, too.

The Democratic Party gets pennies on the corporate dollar that the GOP gets. It's high time the party leadership pull it's collective head out of the corporate rectum and realize that their base has suffered greatly over the past 36 years under GOP and southern conservative Democrat mismanagement. If they don't wake up and address this fact, they deserve to keep losing elections. If they don't wake up and address this fact, they can kiss my vote goodbye in 2008, and I'm not alone.

[patrice]

2. Certainly people should not be over-simplified into either category.

But, for me, the observation that people will "Cut their nose off to spite their face" is something that I've heard since childhood from my mother.

I think it has something to do with a reflexive drive for something like self-determination in people who are frustrated and lack necessary information.

[Hoping4Change]

5. The article knocked my socks off. Viciousness is effective.

Ames statement that "Americans respect viciousness" is on the mark and explains a brutal exchange I had on Drudge Retort after I had it up to my kazoo reading moronic posts about Bush from freepers.

I threw niceness out the window and went for the jugular. That I was viscious and rude is an understatendment, I wrote how poor and lower income whites were being used as toilet bowls by Shrubco. That Shrubco lived in luxury while stupid ignorant white boys are happy with rhetoric, expressing gratitude for being toilet bowls for the powerful dicks in the WH. I think you get my drift so I'll spare the raunchy excess. Anyway a freeper responds by askng me to explain how they are being treated like toilet bowls? It was as if something I said got through.

I was my polite in my response and gave a link to a brief article that lays out point by point Shrubco's largesse to the top 1% and the shafting of the rest of America.

[Eloriel]

6. Here's another, related, take on the subject of why the

working class votes against itself. This one's definitely worth reading too:

Let Them Eat War, By Arlie Hochschild, tomdispatch.com, January 15, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16885