In a Slate article — "Buy Stock, Vote Bush" — Daniel Gross points out that the conventional wisdom about stock ownership and Republicanism doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
He offers the following as the first of many possible explanations for this:
… the flip side of Thomas Frank's theory in What's the Matter With Kansas. Frank, a Democrat, argues that poor Kansans vote against their economic self-interest for Republicans, because the GOP has deluded them that social issues matter more than economic ones. Perhaps investors — more educated and socially liberal — vote against their economic self-interest for similar reasons, because they prefer Democratic positions on social issues.
What strikes me here is the presumption that self-interest is, or ought to be, a primary motivation for voters.
Franks' thesis (I've read the reviews, not yet the book) is attractive to me in that I too find it strange and discouraging that so many working-class "Reagan Democrats" cast their votes in a way that directly harms the economic prospects of themselves, their families and neighbors.
One of the most astonishing moments I've witnessed in American politics came at the Christian Coalition's 1996 "Road to Victory" convention, at which former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, gave a speech calling for the repeal of the estate tax. I watched a hall filled with working class people stand and applaud.
Why? Aside from Armey and Pat Robertson, there could not have been five people in that room who would ever owe a dime in estate taxes. Many of those present, in fact, worked for nonprofit ministries whose very existence was made possible by estate planning donations that would not exist if not for the estate tax. Yet Armey spoke for the party of God, and so whatever he said was applauded — even when it meant a $12 billion annual reduction in charitable giving and an inevitable increase in the tax burden of wage-earners like those present.
So on the one hand, I would definitely like to see more Americans — more working-class and middle-class Americans — paying more attention to their economic self-interest at the ballot box. George W. Bush's economic policies have been a disaster for these people, and they will not be among the chosen few at the top to benefit from his "ownership society" agenda for the next four years.
On the other hand, I don't think self-interest ought to be the exclusive or primary motive for casting one's ballot. If that were the case we would have to abandon any notion of the common good and accept that all policymaking and governance is a zero-sum game between competing factions. A policy benefiting the most fortunate 51 percent, while screwing over everybody else, would be blessed with an electoral mandate. (As would a policy benefiting only white people, or only straight people.)
How big a role does self-interest — or perceived self-interest — play in the way the electorate casts its votes? Louis Menand suggests an answer in The New Yorker. Menand discusses Philip Converse's 1964 book The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics in an essay titled "The Unpolitical Animal." It's rather discouraging:
Converse claimed that only around 10 percent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people “ideologues,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of … how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use terms like "liberal" and "conservative," but Converse thought that they basically don't know what they're talking about …
About 42 percent of voters, according to Converse's interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest.
The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about 25 percent) or from factors that have no discernible "issue content" whatever. Converse put 22 percent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system.
What's more, Menand notes, the 42 percent who vote based on their perceived self-interest don't usually have any idea what their own self-interest entails. He cites a study by Larry Bartels (summarized in this American Prospect article):
Bartels has also found that when people do focus on specific policies they are often unable to distinguish their own interests. His work … concerned public opinion about the estate tax. When people are asked whether they favor Bush's policy of repealing the estate tax, two-thirds say yes — even though the estate tax affects only the wealthiest 1 or 2 percent of the population. 98 percent of Americans do not leave estates large enough for the tax to kick in. But people have some notion — Bartels refers to it as "unenlightened self-interest" — that they will be better off if the tax is repealed.
What is most remarkable about this opinion is that it is unconstrained by other beliefs. Repeal is supported by 66 percent of people who believe that the income gap between the richest and the poorest Americans has increased in recent decades, and that this is a bad thing. And it's supported by 68 percent of people who say that the rich pay too little in taxes.
Menand concludes his discussion of the behavior of "unpolitical" voters with this observation:
Individual voters are not rational calculators of self-interest (nobody truly is), and may not be very consistent users of heuristic shortcuts, either. But they are not just random particles bouncing off the walls of the voting booth. Voters go into the booth carrying the imprint of the hopes and fears, the prejudices and assumptions of their family, their friends and their neighbors. For most people, voting may be more meaningful and more understandable as a social act than as a political act.
That it is hard to persuade some people with ideological arguments does not mean that those people cannot be persuaded, but the things that help to convince them are likely to make ideologues sick …
Applying this lesson to the debate on the estate tax leads me to three thoughts:
1. The Republican strategy of exclusively referring to the estate tax as the "death tax" — although brazenly dishonest — has been very effective. I propose a more accurate nickname: the Dead Millionaire's Tax.
2. It may even be better not to allow the debate to be framed in terms of a repeal of the Dead Millionaire's Tax, but to put the crippling blow to local churches and other charities front and center. I oppose Bush's proposal to eliminate $12 billion in tax deductions for charitable giving. If he wants to help his rich friends he can do it without taking money from the offering plate.
3. There's a special room in Hell for lying kleptocrats like Dick Armey. And an even more special one for Pat Robertson and the other false prophets who bless them.
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