> * People vote their aspirations.
>
> The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a
> Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1
> percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the
> richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So
> right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr.
> Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a
> direct shot at them.
YES, YES, YES! Excellent article!
As someone who's worked with labor organizers and who has worked as an activist to convince others the merits of organizing their workplaces, I can definitely say that this dynamic applies outside electoral politics.
For example, one of the reasons few people - especially in my age group or younger - are interested in unions is that they think it is an implicit admission of defeat in what they imagine to be their career leader. They are "on their way up" and joining or forming a union, to them, is an implicit admission that they've gotten about as far as they'll get, so best batten down the hatches and hold here. Everyone is going to be rich, you see, so to join a union makes no sense in jobs that are seen as a temporary stop on the way to Easy Street.
(There's other types of resistance to unions as well, of course, but in the under-30 age group this one is massive, no matter how iconoclastic the individual thinks they really are.)
Brian
--
"At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Il etait enfin venu, le jour ou je fus un pourceau!" - Comte de Lautreamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, 4th Hymn, Strophe 6