12/27/2004
KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
“Self-Interest” and Voting in the Last Election
One of the things that baffled many observers on the left as they studied
the voting patterns that led to Bush’s re-election was the appeal that Bush had to
blue-collar males and middle class voters. By almost any objective measure,
Bush’s tax cuts, free trade policies, and other economic policies appeared to be
hurting normal working Americans, squeezing the middle class, while enriching
our largest corporations and the already rich. Yet a significant percentage of
those being hurt by Bush’s policies were voting for Bush.
Voters appeared to voting against their own self-interest, lured into doing
so by the cheap or cynical use of cultural issues by conservatives. Those on the
left appeared baffled by the success of this strategy.
Their problem begins with the definition of “self-interest” primarily in
materialist terms. That, ironically, is a view shared by both crude free market
economists on the right and vulgar Marxists on the left. Recall Marx’s comment
that religion was the “opiate of the masses.”
Our popular economic dialogue reinforces this narrow vision of what
“economic self-interest” means. “Economic” is taken to refer to the material
means of survival. The metaphors are familiar: Bread and butter issues, roofs
over our heads, shirts on our backs. “Economics” is taken to mean basic food,
shelter, and clothing.
But that is not what we spend most of our money on. It is not what most of
the productive capacity of our economy is focused on. Look at what is being sold
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at our shopping malls, our boutique shops, or even Wal-Mart. The recent
excesses of our Christmas shopping binge dramatically illustrate that. Look at the
homes we inhabit and the cars and trucks we drive. We are not primarily focused
on physical survival even in our economic activities.
People’s sense of self-interest is much wider than the materialist focus of
many on both the right and left. Questions of identity, life style, and community
are also central. Who we are, how we live together, and what our visions are of
ourselves, our community, and our nation are also central to our sense of well
being. For humanity, how we live has almost always been as important as that
we lived. Because of that any real politics has to also speak to those broader
needs and aspirations.
That was the real meaning of the exit polls that reported that voters who
were concerned with questions of values tended to vote for Bush. It was not
primarily primitive fear mongering based on “God, gays, and guns” that drew
people to Bush. It was his and the Republican focus on a broader vision of what
America and Americans were or should be pursuing. One could argue with the
details of Bush’s particular policies, and many who voted for him did, but people
still appreciated the fact that he was confident and enthusiastic about the
direction he wanted to take the country. In short, he had an explicit ideological
vision and a story to tell.
Progressives or liberals in recent years have largely abandoned the
ideological and philosophic “values” field to conservatives, choosing to focus,
instead, on pragmatic policies to solve specific problems. But clearly, at the
national level, being pragmatic policy wonks, no matter how good they are at it, is
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not enough. Progressives need to work on communicating their principles, not
just their policy positions.
Attacking Bush is not enough either, although criticizing his policies
certainly is important: “Telling truth to power” and to the American people. But
that negative strategy also has an important downside: Without an alternative
positive message, it sounds like it is the nation and what it stands for that is being
attacked and that is one place where progressives or liberals get crossways with
voters on values issues.
Americans, like the rest of humanity, want to live lives of hope, direction,
accomplishment, and pride. They want that for their families, communities, and
their nation.
Bush, if he does nothing else well, taps into that need at the national level.
As he tells it, while protecting us against irrational enemies who hate our
fundamental values, he is simultaneously extending American values to the rest
of the world, bringing freedom and choice to oppressed people around the globe.
The dangerous jingoistic, ethnocentric, know-nothing character of this vision is
easy to attack, and it should be attacked. But if progressives do not offer their
own positive “big picture” vision of our country’s role in the world while also
tapping into to traditional American values to provide a positive vision of our
future and how we are to realize it, progressives will lose again and again.
We all want to identify with something beyond our work-a-day struggles.
We want some sense of meaning to our individual and collective lives. That is
part of our needs, our self-interest. A politics that seeks to ignore or denigrate
that need is a politics that is going nowhere.
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