I have also considered this question, my answer is that the party on the "right" will have a core mission of maintaining the power and wealth of the powerful and wealthy.
This is, unsuprisingly, not a great vote winner for the masses. So around this core mission they need to build a platform, and so they pick the easiest way to attract voters to this cause up until the point when they get a majority that's able to actually fulfil the core mission.
This explains lots of interesting things about politics. Why do the right hate foreigners, gays, athiests, muslims, transexuals etc. Why do they love patriotisms and wars and the good old days? Is there any obvious link between "good business" or "small government" and hating gays? The basic answer is that it's a cheap way to rally people to your cause.
Nowadays it's common for right wing people to be openly gay, when for a long time they had to be hypocritical and keep it secret while attacking their own community. But cleary there's no direct link between sexuality and political orientation, the party just decided to start a culture war against a powerless minority for their own profit and some people ended on the wrong side of the line.
Just think Buzzfeed but for politics, they want your click/vote, and they'll plumb the depths of human psychology to find out what they need to say to get it.
Corbyn is like the anti-buzzfeed. Dry boring headlines about what's actually important. Let's try pacificism, and consider that perhaps the people who died on the other side of our wars were actually human too.
So I would say it's irrational, most people are if they don't put time and effort into not being. And if someone has a financial interest in you not being rational, they have a good head start and some obvious levers to push to get what they want.
You’re assuming poor American working class voters vote against their interests by voting conservative. Leaving aside the social issues for now and looking solely at economic ones, let’s ask the question whether that’s true to them in their own minds.
The American liberal party (Democrats) brands itself as the party that’s going to help you out. It’ll leverage redistribution (taxes) to take money from rich people and corporations and get you stuff like free healthcare, free college, unemployment insurance, etc. That should sound pretty appealing if you’re poor.
However, the American conservative party (Republicans) brands itself as the party that’s going to get out of your way. It’ll cut taxes, remove regulations, get government out of your life and basically let you determine your own path without trying to hold your hand the whole way. Sure, less free stuff than the Democrats offer, but Republicans believe there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Nothing comes without strings attached in the Republican worldview, even if in the Democrat view of course there are no strings.
These two economic angles tap into completely different mindsets.
The Democrat angle taps into two mentalities: “We need to help people out” and “Free stuff? Don’t mind if I do!” The former is the wealthier, more educated Democrats, who feel life’s been good to them and they’d like to see others benefit too. The latter are the poor Democrats, who feel life’s been unfair to them and they could use a little help.
The Republican angle taps into one mentality: “People can make it on their own salt.” If you’re a poor Republican, you just want to be able to live your life without worrying about government handouts with strings attached. The idea of free stuff is a little insulting to you – it implies you can’t make it on your own. If you’re a wealthy Republican, you feel like you got what you got fair and square, and the idea of taking what you’ve earned and giving it to someone who hasn’t earned it goes against everything this country stands for.
You can ultimately boil American conservatives and liberals down into individualists (conservatives) and collectivists (liberals). Redistribution is fine for liberals because we’re all the same anyway – if two people have differing wealth, it’s because of unfairness, and we can use redistribution to remedy that unfairness. Redistribution is anathema to conservatives; it’s insulting to the poor and it’s robbery to the rich, not to mention it upends the profit motive, which in the Republican mind spells bad things for the economy.
I suspect the right answer is somewhere between European socialism and robber baron laissez-faire capitalism, but I’ve always been a centrist myself.
I won’t go into social issues in this comment, since it’s already quite long. However, if you want a better grasp of why conservatives have the stances they do and why liberals have the stances they do, I recommend checking out Jonathan Haidt on moral foundations theory first:
Then perhaps a read-through or listen to Will and Ariel Durant’s Lessons of History (keeping an ear out in particular for the discussion of order vs. freedom, and the integral roles they play in society. American conservatives are pro-order socially and pro-freedom economically; American liberals are pro-freedom socially and pro-order economically).
"[The Democrats] get you stuff like free healthcare, free college, unemployment insurance, etc."
No offense, but there's something basic that is amiss with a formulation when two thirds of the examples given are political results that have never been delivered by Democrats and the last one, unemployment insurance, was only grudgingly produced under conditions of a) depression b) significant pressure from the socialists on the Democrats' left.
Indeed. Democrats/liberals are the class party of white-collar professionals and self-styled "meritocrats". Democrat vs Republican should be read as new money vs old money.
Yeah, that all sounds really noble, yet it doesn't really mesh with the modern Republican party successes being built on the "Southern Strategy" which sought to attract white Democrats by playing on racial fears.
I mean that's a double whammy, the voters were previously democratic, putting them on the opposite side of your dichotomies, and various members of the Republican party are on record as using race as a wedge issue, trying to convince white voters that equality was not in their interest (which the chairman of the RNC later apologized explicitly for).
Far smarter men than me are still debating how much is genes, how much is early childhood influence, how much is the result of what you experience along the way, etc.
I don't suspect we'll have anything remotely close to a conclusive answer anytime soon. My guess is it's something like baking a cake; the batter (biology), how mixed or lumpy it is (childhood), and how it's cooked (life experiences) will all play a role, but aside from the extremes like the eggs missing or being grossly under- or overcooked there's no good way to accurately gauge how everything comes together to produce what it does.
Nope, "liberals" are by far the group who favors limited government and individual freedom. Conservatives are the ones who advocate torturing people, legislating womens' medical care, and otherwise intruding government into peoples' lives and bodies.
This is, unsuprisingly, not a great vote winner for the masses. So around this core mission they need to build a platform, and so they pick the easiest way to attract voters to this cause up until the point when they get a majority that's able to actually fulfil the core mission.
This explains lots of interesting things about politics. Why do the right hate foreigners, gays, athiests, muslims, transexuals etc. Why do they love patriotisms and wars and the good old days? Is there any obvious link between "good business" or "small government" and hating gays? The basic answer is that it's a cheap way to rally people to your cause.
Nowadays it's common for right wing people to be openly gay, when for a long time they had to be hypocritical and keep it secret while attacking their own community. But cleary there's no direct link between sexuality and political orientation, the party just decided to start a culture war against a powerless minority for their own profit and some people ended on the wrong side of the line.
Just think Buzzfeed but for politics, they want your click/vote, and they'll plumb the depths of human psychology to find out what they need to say to get it.
Corbyn is like the anti-buzzfeed. Dry boring headlines about what's actually important. Let's try pacificism, and consider that perhaps the people who died on the other side of our wars were actually human too.
So I would say it's irrational, most people are if they don't put time and effort into not being. And if someone has a financial interest in you not being rational, they have a good head start and some obvious levers to push to get what they want.