What Makes So Many Seemingly Vote Against Self-Interest

What Makes So Many Seemingly Vote Against Self-Interest

I write this as a response to a friend, who asked me what I thought was behind so many people’s seeming willingness to vote for Mitt Romney, despite the fact that for a significant majority of the folks in this country a vote for Romney, is a vote against their self-interest.

If I am correct and Romney wins this election, Romney will be in the position to shape this country for generations to come. He will appoint judges; change laws; regulate the personal and private lives of women, who make up more than half the country; and he will make it virtually impossible for social justice, e.g. universal access to healthcare, equal pay, gender equality, for a very long time. 

Plato’s Republic, his most influential work, was written approximately 2,400 years ago; it is a dramatic dialogue about the nature of justice in the ideal city-state.

It is not the intention of this piece to discuss Plato’s philosophical views, but given his influence on Western thought, there are some important lessons to be considered. Through this dialogue Plato offers a conception of the ideal city-state; an Aristocracy. There are 3 castes of citizens. It is ruled by the wise, protected by the guardians, enabling its citizens in the merchant class to flourish. When these three castes of citizens are in harmony the state flourishes. If this ideal state starts to deteriorate, the ruling class starts to lust for power and its government will learn to value power. He calls this new form of government a Timocracy. A Timocracy degenerates into an Oligarchy where power rests in the hands of a few. 

 

Romney and his billionaire CEO friends have a vision for our country, which is Plutocratic, a more sinister form of Oligarchy. Romney has been, rhetorically, accused of being a plutocrat, an individual who represents the values of corporate greed, a corollary of which is power. Oligarchies may be a less virulent; monarchies for example are oligarchies, but the royals may be benign. Romney's policies advocate for a Plutocracy, a more dangerous form of private hegemony, which is the desire to control the social, ideological, and economic influences of our society. The actual consequence of a Romney administration will be that wealth, power, and opportunity get concentrated and benefit only a very few.

Romney does not care about the plight of most Americans; his 47% comments spoke to that. But, what about those he believes he can reach, those that might vote for him? Greed and religion disguised as a challenge to the loss of freedom have become his appeal. Romney demagogues the idea of social justice. Freedom is the most important value, best expressed as access to free markets through the accumulation of wealth. He feigns outrage against President Obama because Obama dares to suggest that a just society should be structured so as to balance freedom with a system of social justice, e.g., universal healthcare, unemployment support, gender equality, pay equality, reproductive rights, and education support. Romney’s demagoguery of Obama’s ideas furthers belligerence and disrespect rather than communication, resulting in his followers forgoing the recognition that they may be voting against their own best interests.

Romney’s support comes from four sources. While my discussion presents each source as distinct, there is nothing that prevents membership in multiple sources. In fact, their success in getting Romney elected depends, at least, on cooperation, but I also hope to expose some of Romney’s duplicity. 

The first group are religious zealots, ideologues like Akin, Fisher, Perkins, Robertson, et al…by offering these zealots a small but disproportionately large piece of the pie...these evangelical leaders mobilize their audiences/legions into believing that God comes before Country, isolating and turning evangelicals against more secular ideas for policy. They create a kind of destructive intra-national crusade, where their God sanctified ends, justify all means. This uncontrolled and irrational piety favors Romney, who has strong religious views of himself; destined to be president. The significance is that despite his poorly veiled avarice and that of his plutocratic allies, these legions of believers have threatened to vote for him, against their own interests 

Part of Romney’s support comes from more secular folks, some intellectuals; more successful oligarchs motivated by greed because they see themselves in a more advantageous position by which they can advantage themselves. Their allegiance is typically to the Republican party because they believe that their best interests are served by its support. In other words, they buy the party platform for more freedom in the form of lower taxes and less government regulation; more for themselves. These folks are not necessarily plutocrats, and while they may understand Romney's vision, they are not critical of it nor fearful because they have access to sufficient resources to live benign and relatively good lives; but they show duplicity by their banality. 

And, there are his billionaire CEO plutocratic supporters who envision themselves as needing control over the social, ideological, and economic influences of our society. They are bold and upfront and challenge the president’s vision as an attack on their freedom. They see social programs, not as safety nets for those with less opportunity, but as programs for a valueless segment of society. Their ideology is simple; they have an obsession with acquiring a monopoly on resources and power and they wish to be completely unregulated in their attempt to acquire it. 

A corollary of this is Romney, et al also recognize that this election may represent the last chance they will have to shape the institutions in this Country. As the demographics in the Nation change, these plutocrats fear a multi-generational loss of power and influence, a consequence of which Progressive principles of justice will be incorporated into our political system and institutions, and their taxes will go up.

Finally, there are Republican members of The United States Congress, who have made a concerted effort to be as obstructionist as possible in an effort to ensure the failure of the President. In my next piece, I will discuss this in more detail because there is more onerous ‘stuff’ going than I have time for here and stuff not immediately relevant to the question at issue.

As I mentioned earlier, what is really happening is that a plutocratic few, Romney among them, recognize the demographics in this country are changing. The US population is increasingly more diverse and the emerging minorities will soon be in the majority. These plutocrats know that this new force in politics does not favor Republican policy, and consequently, they feel threatened. They masquerade as freedom fighters, encouraging Americans to fight for their lost freedom. This misdirected outrage shows its ugly head in the form of tactics such as voter disenfranchisement; as an appeal to the greed of benign oligarchs, the funding of secret pacts to lie in order to undermine President Obama’s credibility, and an appeal to the Fundamentalist zealots and their minions that the current administration's policies are taking away freedom of religion. These legions of God fearing believers vote against their own best interests by voting against principles of justice, which would support and benefit them as well as the Americans they blame for their plight, forgetting that many are part of Romney's 47%.

History has taught us that no civilization has lasted more than a relatively short period of time, despite the sometimes arrogance of self-perception by humans. I am sure the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, Alexander, the Romans, the Ottomans, to name a few, sat around the table discussing the fact that their societies were the be-all and end-all of human civilization; only to be wrong.

The question is: Who are we? Plato warns us that if citizens feel, or more importantly, are disenfranchised, politically, socially, and economically, the next stop is Tyranny; then welcome to the history books U.S.A.