It is a persistent
mystery and a matter of despair to me that poor and minority voters in red
states seem to support conservative Republican congresspersons who publicly and
consistently vote against the personal economic interests of their poor and
minority constituents.
Alec MacGillis on
ProPublica.com has drawn the curtain back, a bit.
The explanation—at
least, part of it—is simple: many of the folks who receive government “safety
net” support are indifferent to the whole politics caboodle, and they don’t
vote. In many Republican strongholds, their neighbors who are higher on the
socio-economic scale do vote, and they elect the fire-breathing Republicans who
badmouth welfare “dependency” and want to cut social benefits.
MacGillis makes a
point of mentioning that in eastern Kentucky and parts of West Virginia and in
other states where there are long-standing pockets of depressed communities and
“people on welfare,” some of the folks who are recently poor or just one step
up—some kind of job, maybe still getting some benefits—are disdainful of the
people who are still living on welfare.
“The people in these
communities who are voting
Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic
ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel
clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance
to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among
those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the
safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their
declining towns.”
MacGillis clarifies the
disconnect between “politics” and Americans who are poor, jobless, and
disadvantaged in many ways:
“In eastern Kentucky and
other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several
decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by
Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing
Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data,
surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the
political process.”
So, the obvious question is
not “Why are these folks voting for Republicans who will make their lives
worse?”
The question is “Why aren’t
these folks voting?”
For that matter, let’s just
broaden the scope of our discussion here:
A central problem of our
democracy is that it isn’t working, because too many people aren’t voting.
Why isn’t that issue a prime
topic of discussion in the debates and the talk shows and in the public arena?
Copyright ©
Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
