Why Do Social Cons Vote against Themselves while Blaming Everyone Else?

A friend asked why any poor person — especially one who works for a company that cheats workers and offshores jobs — would support the Republican Party.

I surmised:

A friend-of-a-friend of mine is a gay Republican who preaches liberty and fiscal responsibility — even though both he and the party practice runaway deficit spending. Furthermore, neither the Libertarians nor the GOP currently affirm individual liberty; they uphold corporate liberty and majority rule by the largest and most repressive churches.

I think this happens because many social conservatives — Tea Party activists and Christian Rightists in particular:

1) have been taught that their “values” are more moral than their neighbors’ values, no matter that their actions betray their values and their neighbors aren’t who or what these rightists claim

2) practice pride as a religious virtue and greed as an economic virtue

3) have been taught to compete against fellow community members via arrogant and dishonest tactics that undermine collaboration and community integrity

4) are too proud or undisciplined to practice what they preach in terms of self-empowerment, which causes them to stagnate financially, educationally, and socially

Their pride and self-defeating behavior preclude Tea Partiers and Christian Rightists from financial and academic growth, leading them to become even more dependent upon bigoted social “value” judgments in order to preserve a sense of superiority.

By undermining education, infrastructure, cultural diversity, and ultimately community prosperity, people who otherwise have little prospect for material success can at least suppress others and assert the superiority of their tribe by ensuring their neighbors become worse off.

Thoughts?

6 Comments

Buffy June 30, 2012 at 11:49 pm -

Republican propaganda tells us that if you’re poor, it’s because you’re lazy and/or morally deficient. When Republicans themselves fall on lean times, they don’t want to think it’s because they’re lazy or morally deficient. Naturally it must be the fault of someone else–like those “tax and spend” Liberals, the family-wrecking gays, or the atheists who make God turn his back on America.
StraightGrandmother July 1, 2012 at 12:05 am -

I think it is much simpler than this. I read a comment once that goes something like this. It is much easier to lead people if you can lead them to hate somebody, to blame somebody. “I not have much but I am better than those (fill in the blank with a minority, a country, people who follow a religion, a political organization….).” And, “The reason my life sucks is because of (fill in the blank).”

It is much harder to Lead people UP, to become better, for the world to be better for everybody.

Of course the person who wrote that wrote it much better than I did. It might have been Ben in Oakland.
ReeseM July 1, 2012 at 9:30 am -

Both very good points. I particularly like SG’s point about leadership through scapegoating. Like how the right blames unions and liberals and taxes and undocumented immigrants for the economic meltdown and slow recovery, when it was mortgage backed securities that started it all. And no conservative ever discusses the unneeded War in Iraq when discussing the deficit.
Jon in Canada July 1, 2012 at 11:23 am -

Pretty much sums it up.
Michael Airhart July 1, 2012 at 7:59 pm -

At Salon.com, Sara Robinson writes about the origin and revival of Confederate “values” which reserve liberty for the wealthiest of the wealthy:

In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more “liberty” you could exercise — which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more “liberties” with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that’s what liberty is. If you don’t have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity — or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself — then you can’t really call yourself a free man.

When a Southern conservative talks about “losing his liberty,” the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control — and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from — is what he’s really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can’t help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they’re willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.

Once we understand the two different definitions of “liberty” at work here, a lot of other things suddenly make much more sense. We can understand the traditional Southern antipathy to education, progress, public investment, unionization, equal opportunity, and civil rights. The fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause. Their obsessive attention to where they fall in the status hierarchies. And, most of all — the unremitting and unapologetic brutality with which they’ve defended these “liberties” across the length of their history.
Gary (NJ) July 2, 2012 at 3:38 pm -

Michael, my experience with people like this, is that they are either stupid or uneducated, or a combination of both. I work with several people like this. They are middle class republicans and although they are ‘nice’ people, they really are clueless about so many things. And of course listening to Fux News just makes it worse.