Voting Against Personal Economic Interest

A couple of days ago on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, there was a very interesting story about how some voters are voting based on cultural beliefs and preferences rather than personal economic interest.

The aspect of this that interests me and that I write about in the book is a nation of people or even a region of people becoming more conservative as conservatism clearly suits their interests less and less and less.

We are becoming a country more like the 19th Century than we were in the middle of the 20th Century in terms of the division of income and in terms of wage growth and that sort of thing. This is happening everywhere. This is not unique to Kansas. It's not unique to the Midwest. This is going on everywhere in America.

The pay differential between CEO's and blue-collar workers, the income differential between the top 10 percent and the bottom 10 percent... there's any number of ways of looking at it.

The shocking thing is that while this is going on, at the same time, you have a conservative revolution going on in this country that never seems to exhaust itself.