My feeling is that delusions of self-image and status are stronger in periods of personal, communal, national uncertainty and restructuring, which is not to say that they are not strong at other times. Reaganism's melding of neoliberal economics, neoconservative politics and romantic traditionalism fostered uncertainty and restructuring while aggressively advancing arguments which asserted attacks on individualism, on the work ethic, on Christianity, on America. I really think that what you say folks prefer to vote for is epoch-bound in many ways, cuz otherwise your argument is that the vast majority of union members, liberal feminists and civil rights activists who voted Democratic between 1936 and 1980 were voting for a self-image, for a status, independent of the relationship between Democratic policies and union, feminist and oppressed minority opportunity.
Of course, I am not so silly as to argue that this stuff wasn't directly related to the cold war or that labor law, civil rights law and anti-discrimination policies weren't written and operationalized in wildly contradictory ways but, nevertheless, I'm certainly not sold by the strong statement of your position as a broad-spectrum generalization.
On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
> [WS:] I have a different fish to fry here - to argue against the idea,
> popular on
> the left, that people will eventually vote to defend their pocket books. I
> find it rather unlikely. They will rather vote for those that offer them
> delusions about their own self-image and status.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>