There used to be a joke among Anglican religious that people who came from money entered the Franciscans and people who grew up poor joined Holy Cross. With the electorate it is often the reverse. People with money want to keep their money, and so in self-interest choose the candidate less likely to increase the tax burden on the highest brackets. And vice versa. Cui bono, quid pro quo, and q.e.d.
TSH
The truly tragic dimension to all of this is that the poorer social classes—uneducated, often unemployed, pumped up by demagogues resenting their powerlessness—are blind enough to go out and vote AGAINST their own interests! Because of evangelical perversion or jingoistic patriotitis or conspiracy paranoia, they will cut their very own political throats. It surely doesn't hold out much hope for representative democracy as a desirable social system. Among other things, it is the absence of any sense of the commonweal.
ReplyDeleteTime to re-read Umberto Eco's 1995 essay... http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
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