My recent diary about the motivations of Republican voters got a lot of attention, for which I'm very grateful. Today I had another thought about why people vote Republican, as my quest to understand why people who aren't billionaires, gun nuts or religious fanatics do so continues.
"Conservatives" (a term that, when used as a noun, is just shorthand for fans of the GOP, be they casual or militant or anywhere in between; those who generally prefer to have Republicans win elections) are fond of telling us (and themselves) that a lot more people identify as conservative than as liberal, meaning there are a lot more of them than there are of us, thus America is fundamentally a conservative country. "Liberals" (ditto vis-à-vis Democrats), in turn, are fond of reminding conservatives, and themselves, that when people are polled on specific, discrete issues they tend to come down on the liberal side of just about every major public-policy question, almost uniformly, often by large margins. And of course, Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, the quadrennial poll that has by orders of magnitude the largest sample size of all polls.
So why do Americans who prefer liberal solutions to important large-scale public-policy problems still vote Republican?
I always get pushback whenever I argue that Republican voters vote that way because they want to punish someone, or to retaliate for the rhetorical excesses of "the Left." The knee-jerk reaction, of course, is that I'm unfairly lumping all Republican voters together, when obviously not every conservative is cruel, selfish, mean, irrational and delicate. No one likes to be told that their personal political preference is motivated by unflattering traits like self-congratulation and resentment. In fact, I'm often told by Republican voters that "I'm not congratulating myself, and I don't resent anyone. I just don't want to have to work hard and do the right thing every day just to support lazy thugs and illegals who do drugs and don't want to work." Nope, no self-congratulation or resentment there, nosirree.
In all seriousness, those who push back on the selfishness-and-cruelty hypothesis often tell me that people vote Republican because they "just want to be left alone." They don't want to pay more taxes, they don't want to be regulated, they don't want to be told how to run their businesses or their lives. That's what "less government" means; leave me alone, don't make me pay for things I don't want, don't make me do things I don't want to do. Is that too much to ask?
Now, one could question whether voting Republican is a rational approach to achieving the tax-free not-paying-for-things being-left-alone utopia that they describe, but that's a separate issue. One might also argue that this "don't tax me, don't regulate me, just leave me be" refrain, is just another way of saying that they don't want to be accountable or responsible for their actions, to anyone but themselves. They don't need regulation because they already know how to run their businesses safely and ethically; they don't need laws because they would never think of doing anything wrong; they don't need government telling them what they already know. There is a self-congratulatory undertone there, and a little resentment. It's also a highly subjective view of the law and public policy. The objective view would be that we need to regulate [X] and we need laws to control [Y], in order to prevent [Z]. As opposed to, "I would never [Z], so [X] and [Y] are needless and arbitrary intrusions on my freedom."
But there's another distinction that gets to the heart of my question about voting Republican despite preferring liberal policy solutions, that I think the I-just-want-to-be-left-alone refrain illustrates. When people ask me to distinguish liberalism from conservatism, I try to do so without portraying one as good and one as evil as if political life in America were one big Bond movie. One of the broad, generalized, hopefully-neutral comparisons I've come up with is that liberals believe we need to spend money and change our behavior in order to solve our problems, whereas conservatives believe that we can solve our problems without changing our behavior or spending any money.
This is essentially, I think, a shorter version of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his speech to the 1936 Democratic Convention:
Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says, "Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. ... We will do all of them. We will do more of them, we will do them better, and most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything."
That struck a chord with me when I first heard it, which was probably on Thom Hartmann's program during the seemingly endless 2009-10 health care debate. Conservatives are always accusing Democrats of stealing their money through taxes and forcing them to act or forbear against their will; liberals are always accusing Republicans of wanting people to suffer and making them suffer by denying (or withdrawing) the help they need. Democrats complain that Republican proposals are too cruel; Republicans complain that Democratic proposals are too costly. Both parties, of course, deny such evil and authoritarian motives. That led me to the notion that the essence of our current political debate is whether we are a nation of
people, or a nation of
money, as each of our major political parties always seems bent on protecting one from the other, and accusing the other side of not caring about the one each is protecting.
But we have to give people, as opposed to politicians, the benefit of the doubt. So, while conservatives generally do care about people, and liberals generally do care about money, we're still left with the fact that people overwhelmingly prefer Democratic and liberal solutions to public-policy problems but do not identify as "liberal" and do not vote Democratic by similar margins. One could theorize that a significant percentage of those who support liberal solutions is nevertheless unwilling to kick in any tax dollars, or change their own behavior, to actually make those solutions work.
Sure, they're in favor of fixing our roads and bridges, but they don't want to pay taxes or tolls to fund it and don't want to drive out of their way during construction. Sure, they're in favor of cleaner air and water, but they don't want to have to turn off the A/C at night or put their trash in separate containers and they don't want higher energy bills. They support liberal policies in the abstract, and think they're good ideas, but only to the point where they can be accomplished without having to raise taxes, make anything more expensive, or make anyone change their behavior.
If there's one thing -- among many -- that conservatives don't get about liberals, it's that liberals in general are willing to change their behavior, pay higher taxes and spend more money if it means living in a cleaner, fairer, safer and more just and equitable nation. Are conservatives as willing to give those things up to save a few bucks on taxes and have more personal autonomy? Most conservatives I talk to about this don't think they'd be giving anything up; not anything they need or want, anyway. I have yet to hear a Republican voter articulate something real, concrete and valuable that (s)he would be willing to sacrifice in order to have a government that collects no taxes and leaves them (and business, and industry, and banks, &c.) alone.
So, I guess the answer is that Republican voters vote Republican because they don't want to have to spend any money or change their behavior in order to address the nation's needs or solve any of its problems. That's probably true whether they consider "the nation's needs [and] problems" to mean other people's needs and problems, or their own.
As noted above, whether there's actually a rational relationship between voting Republican and being relieved of legal and social obligations is a separate question. I'm still genuinely looking for a good reason to consider voting Republican in 2016. So far, I haven't found one.