Whenever someone asks me, usually with a voice filled with frustration, "Why do so many lower-middle class whites vote against their own economic self interests by supporting Republicans?" I have developed a ready answer. "It’s the Tycoon Fantasy," I say.
There has never been another country in the history of the world in which it’s been as possible to rise from low status abject poverty to international heights of wealth, power and esteem. The history of the United States has been littered with prominent examples, and a large part of our success as a nation has been predicated on the upward mobility of people who began with nothing.
Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, and Sacagawea appear on our currency---- and many of them spent long portions of their lives without as much to their name or family as a single bill or coin on which they now appear. Hundreds of more anonymous people rose from poverty to prominence in America. Our current president, like me, was the product of a bi-racial marriage where the father left the family and the country, leaving the mother to survive on food stamps for a brief period.
But at the same time, there have always been forces in this country—in both parties-- that seek to game the odds by trying to exclude entire classes of people from the ladders to success or full participation in society. Native Americans, women, African-Americans, Jews, immigrants, gays, union members, pacifists, liberals, Muslims, and Mormons have all known systemic, codified, legal discrimination.
Yet through all these eras of waning and waxing discrimination, one thing has remained constant: the desire and possibility of wild, exploding, unimaginable success. It’s the kind of possibility of sustained success that hadn’t been conceivable anywhere around the world until the United States established it by example in its earliest founding days, and a concept that never really reached most of the rest of the world until after World War II.
The Tycoon Fantasy is in our nation’s collective DNA. From Benjamin Franklin’s inventions, to Lewis and Clark’s explorations, to Abe Lincoln’s rail-splitting, to Horatio Alger’s bootstraps, to immigrant homesteaders, to early Hollywood movie moguls, to Ralph Kramden’s get-rich-quick schemes, to the promotion of the IDEA of Joe the Plumber, the notion that anyone with a great idea and some good breaks could rise to the top is a uniquely American possibility.
The Republican Party has been brilliantly astute at playing on this fantasy over the past 30 years. In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with promoting a positive, hopeful vision for the future that builds on the American tradition of free enterprise.
But over the past 75 years, the Republicans have tapped as much into the concept of limiting the opportunities of others as they have in promoting the possibilities for all. They capture the votes of lower-class white people in the same way infomercials promote get-rich-quick schemes filmed at palm tree-festooned poolfronts. They seek to eliminate the middle class in order to make it more of a crapshoot to jump from poverty to the upper class. They plug flat taxes, elimination of the social safety net, privatization, lobbyist-written legislation, elimination of inheritance taxes, and no-bid contracts. In short, laissez-faire economics, the only French word they support in our vocabulary.
Without a large and healthy middle class, there are very few routes up the economic ladder. The GOP is essentially selling lotto tickets as a route to prosperity, because it’s easier, more profitable, and more amenable to their base. And millions of lower and lower class voters are buying their lotto tickets, with Tycoon Fantasies of saving 3% off the top marginal rate of income tax when they finally, inevitably collect their winnings.