by Gary Galles
Mises.org
In the twenty-first century, it seems that during every year divisible by 4, the left recycles their “analysis” that many Americans vote against their self-interest by not electing Democrats. The most famous of these quadrennial efforts was historian Thomas Frank’s 2004 What’s the Matter with Kansas, which spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He argued that people in his home state voted Republican, even though it undermined Democrats’ redistributive agenda which would have expanded government coercion and shifted more of others’ resources to Kansans, an “obvious” violation of their self-interest. In the face of economic difficulties, “ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.”
In the current election, similar views were channeled by Leon Friedman in a Huffington Post article titled “Why Does the (White) Lower Middle Class Vote Republican?” The core of his analysis was: