Disinterest

I've never been a fan of the trope of "People voting against their economic interests." There are just so many things wrong with it, that it strikes me as patently thoughtless. For starters, economic interests are not everyone's end-all and be-all. Declaring groups of citizens non-people and allowing others to simply take their homes and possessions is certainly in the best interests of people outside the groups voted out; this is basically what happened to the Japanese in the United States during World War Two, and it's now considered a blot on America's record, rather than a rationally self-interested action on the part of those persons not of Japanese ancestry. And American history is full of such examples where, looking back, modern Americans see placing economic interests above legal and/or ethical ones as failings.

But, perhaps more salient to the current American electorate is the fact that turning to other people for one's economic interests requires trust. And this bring up another circumstance in which people are, on the surface, constantly acting against their economic interests, and no-one bats an eyelash. There is a common confidence trick called "money flipping." The basic gist of it is this, some person offers another person, generally a stranger on social media, the chance to invest some amount of money for a short period of time, and, at the end of that time, they'll be returned some multiple of the amount invested. Anyone who understands anything about how investing actually works doesn't even entertain the thought that these sorts of schemes might be legitimate, even though, technically, they aren't outside the realm of possibility. But one is considered gullible, if not simply stupid, for going along with something like this, because invariably, the person who the money was invested with simply vanishes without a trace.

And that brings me to politics. Here in the United States, the Culture Wars are never very far away, and I think that I'm starting to understand a reason for this. The Culture Wars have the effect of divorcing politics and policy. Two politicians can espouse roughly the same policy, and decent-sized groups of the public will embrace or dismiss them based on perceived positions in the Culture Wars, rather than on the substance of policy. Mainly by making other people out to be liars and confidence artists. While its common for people to decry a lack of support for some policy or another as "people voting against their economic interests," that assessment presupposes that a certain level of trust exists. People trust that a jobs plan proposed by a member of the opposing party will raise their own standards of living about as much as they trust a money flipper to actually come through with a supposed investment. And since, in a time of partisan-induced government gridlock, policies are unlikely to produce widespread and unambiguous benefits that don't have costs for anyone, it's hard to point to the evidence of success as a means of swaying people.

And since the Culture Wars (at least as they exist in the United States) are there to be fought, rather than to actually be won, there's never any real expectation of victory, or, it seems, even measurable progress. The fight is the end in itself.

It's rather clever, really. It nearly removes any and all expectation from politics, by changing the interest calculation from one of tangible benefit to one of an endless conflict with people whose only defining characteristic is that they are not be trusted.