Does Self Loathing Explain Why Poor and Middle Class Americans Vote against their Interests? — Edwin Lyngar’s Autobiographical Essay Implies So

© 2014 Peter Free

 

16 July 2014

 

 

I have never understood why most of the Republican Party’s un-wealthy base votes the way it does . . .

 

But Edwin Lyngar appears to understand, having switched from “conservative” to “liberal” politics in middle age — going in the reverse direction of so many others:

 

 

I was a 20-year-old college dropout with no more than $100 in the bank the day my son was born in 1994.

 

We were poor, and my overwhelming response to poverty was a profound shame that drove me into the arms of the people least willing to help — conservatives.

 

Coming from the white working class, I’d always been taught that food stamps were for the “others” — failures, drug addicts or immigrants, maybe — not for real Americans like me.  I could not bear the stigma, so we walked out before our number was called.

 

Even though we didn’t take the food stamps, we lived in the warm embrace of the federal government with subsidized housing and utilities, courtesy of Uncle Sam.

 

Yet I blamed all of my considerable problems on the government, the only institution that was actively working to alleviate my suffering.

I railed against government spending (i.e., raising my own salary).  At the same time, the earned income tax credit was the only way I could balance my budget at the end of the year.

 

I felt my own poverty was a moral failure.

 

© 2014 Edwin Lyngar, I was poor, but a GOP die-hard: How I finally left the politics of shame, Salon (16 July 2014) (extracts)

 

Eventually, he wised up:

 

 

I’m angry at my younger self, not for being poor, but for supporting politicians who would have kept me poor if they were able.

 

Despite my personal attempts to destroy the safety net, those benefits helped me.  I earned a bachelor’s degree for free courtesy of a federal program, and after my military service I used the GI Bill to get two graduate degrees, all while making ends meet with the earned income tax credit.

 

The GI Bill not only helped me, it also created much of the American middle class after World War II.

 

Conservatives often crow about “supporting the military,” but imagine how much better America would be if the government used just 10 percent of the military budget to pay for universal higher education, rather than saddling 20-year-olds with mortgage-like debt.

 

Government often fails because the moneyed interests don’t want it to succeed.  They hate government and most especially activist government (aka government that does something useful).

 

Their hatred for government is really disdain for Americans, except as consumers or underpaid labor.

 

© 2014 Edwin Lyngar, I was poor, but a GOP die-hard: How I finally left the politics of shame, Salon (16 July 2014) (extracts)

 

 

“Disdain” sums it up

 

I have noticed that most of the “conservatives” I know are either:

 

 

(a) oblivious to the random breaks and often unearned support they got in getting to where they are

 

or, even more broadly —

 

(b) oblivious to the way that Reality statistically works.

 

Both lapses are forms of analytical and emotional stupidity, which display (usually unconsciously) as unempathic arrogance.

 

 

The moral? — The ability to see (i) others in ourselves and (ii) ourselves in others and (iii) to love both — is what separates wisdom from manipulative greed

 

Self-loathing is usually a sign that someone else’s propagandized value system has, usually without justice, become our own.

 

Sadly, most of us enter the world stupid, and we stay that way with unexamined determination.