WILLFUL IGNORANCE

Political parties matters. Polls can no longer predict how a candidate will vote by what he or she says on the campaign trail as they once did. In the “old days”, politicians were beholden to the voters in their districts. This populism was so because they depended on donations to finance their campaigns. Historically, there were no rules saying this but politicians were people who could most afford to campaign. They could ride horse back from town to town, which meant they could not be working; therefore, they had to depend on their personal fortune or the generosity of supporters to survive. Although most of us never think along these lines, this resulted in a narrowly focused group of people who could be political candidates; generally, they were not in the working class. They were the rich or were in the professions; lawyers seem to lead the pack with generals following closely.

Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson are classic example of “anyone can be president”, but this is true only if we overlook the fact that they were exceptions; Lincoln became a lawyer when most lawyers were rich. Jackson was a general before becoming a farmer, but nonetheless, he was a rich farmer. In addition to candidate background, many other things influence party membership. Scientists seem to think that about 33% of a person’s political affiliation is associated with his or her genes that is, “political beliefs are innate”. I believe that nurturing plays a big part. Scientists partition the nurturing and nature affiliations by studying siblings and twins; thus, bury the positive nurturing affect of genetic “like” parents. This suggests to me that genetics pays a bigger part then scientists generally think, a belief I advance on this blog site.

In addition, to this there is the fact that many people vote in an illogical way. In a sense, they vote their innate feeling or their genes, which may be a vote against their own best interest. If people do something without explanation, in my opinion, one of the first places to look is the genome. Let me give an example:

Pollsters ask people if they support affordable health care. Well over 50% of the people support that program, a remarkable figure in the face of the massive hate “Obamacare” rhetoric. It is a standard response to deplore old age poverty and support Social Security. There is some anti social security program rhetoric but it is not as massive as in the current health care question. It harkens, back to residual hate for FDR’s social upheaval of the early 1930’s, the so-called “New Deal”. In addition, there are many other government programs with overwhelming public support, including such diverse things as food stamps and the Pentagon.  Now move to the budget. Polls show everyone wants a balanced budget, not by a slim margin but tremendously. The public overwhelmingly agree that “we the people” need to pay for what they buy. We collectively hate defect spending but we all do it; house mortgage, car loans, layaway programs. In other words, we understand finance.

Thus, poll results make it abundantly clear; we want the government to provide all these good things and we know we have to pay for them. It makes no sense to me that people cannot put these two things together. Frank Lutz has repeatedly shown this dichotomy of reason in focus groups, small groups of people who express opinion. The magic of focus groups is that the experimenter can select the political affiliation of the members in any one group. This is the exact opposite of polling; for example those poll results just referenced; most polltakers try to be honest and try to reach a cross-section of voter, which gives value to what they do. Focus group results are the exact opposite from polling results. When asked, regardless of political affiliation, people in focus groups overwhelmingly object to paying taxes, duties, fines, etc, which are answers in stark contrast to polling results in the sense that people want all the good things that government does for them but do not want to pay for them. This disconnect is covered up by innumerable schemes but the fact remains, we cannot have all the nice things we overwhelmingly want if we do not pay for them.

If we understand finance, how can it be that we do not want a debt yet do not want to pay taxes? The political fury around election time centers on this point with one huge caveat; Democrats want all these things and so do Republicans but neither Democrat nor Republican wants to pay for them. Listen during the campaign and you will hear political pendants say this in a hundred different ways; Democrats belong to a “tax and spend” party, Republicans claim to belong to a fiscally responsible party. It makes no sense that politicians deny the things they believe in. How can anyone, by any stretch of the imagination, living in a democracy, deny this? Nevertheless, as the poll results indicate, people vote for Republican candidates because they want all of these social programs and tell the people that they can have them without paying taxes. This is incredible but clearly falls in within the pattern predicted by Frank Lutz.

Apparently and in direct conflict with Republican campaign rhetoric, it seems that people in general think they can have expensive social programs without paying for them but so do people who know that is not reasonable; they say one thing and vote something else. Why? It makes no sense. Their votes prove this beyond reasonable doubt. What it also proves is that they vote the way they do because they want to hang on to their money—they earned it so they want to keep it. As the polls show, selfishness is innate in the great majority of all of us. It is the three billion year old “red in tooth and claw survival”; clearly, bestial survival of the fittest means survival of the ones that have the most. Call it willful ignorance if you want. As a Democrat, I believe that is carrying conservatism too far; I feel our humanization has moved us beyond that, at least some of us.  

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