Why Do People Vote Republican?

[Lizard King]

It may be possible to suggest as a broad generalization, without giving undue offence, that those of us more inclined to vote (D) than (R) tend to ascribe that choice to a certain degree of enlightened intelligence; and, among their number, there exists a tendency to ascribe the contrary choice to vote Republican to various base motives - greed, racism, and so on. The implication often is that Democrats vote for what is right and logical, while Republicans vote for what they are duped into.

From my perspective, I'm quite as guilty of performing the same analysis with the labels switched: most Democrats I know strike me as well-meaning but misguided souls, people who genuinely vote for the outcomes they want but in so doing vote for the party that won't provide them, or contrariwise people who vote for outcomes they want but that no party could possibly provide. It may be that for every Democrat who dismisses Republicans as uneducated rubes, there's a Republican who dismisses Democrats as naïve idealists. But I digress.

Here's an article by Jonathan Haidt, a self-proclaimed left-wing sympathizer, about why people vote Republican. It's interesting stuff, I think.

edge.org/conversation/what-makes-vote-republican

[zibazinski]

I vote republican but I have pointed out to MANY male candidates or already office holders that they need to focus on jobs and the economy not women's reproductive rights.

[sesfw]

Why do people vote democrat?

I am a registered Republican but I vote as my conscience and common sense tells me to.

[gooddecisions]

Why do people vote tea party? They are bunch of hillbilly, uneducated, anarchist haters.

[gooddecisions]

Everyone hated Cantor and rightfully so, but voting in a tea party member is way, way worse. Talk about "party of no".

[Lizard King]

It's my own fault. I should have made the TITLE tl;dr, and kept the post brief.

I'm such a n00b.

[Lizard King]

ETA... do anarchists even vote? Seems that would be a bit hypocritical of them

It's a broad umbrella, anarchism. The idea that nobody has authority over anybody else is actually a very democratic one in the purest sense, so there's not necessarily any conflict between being an anarchist and holding a vote.

I tend to think of anarchism as 'right anarchism,' which is very strongly individualist, but very strongly collectivist 'left anarchism' also exists and is a system of self-government for a number of stable and peaceful communities around the world.

[Lizard King]

Jul 1, 2014 11:57:44 GMT -5 gooddecisions said:

Why do people vote tea party? They are bunch of hillbilly, uneducated, anarchist haters.

And this is how Haidt used to feel about it, because his political conditioning led him to believe there were no good ideas on the other side of the fence. It simply had to be the case that The Other Lot were hateful, ignorant, reactionary, and reflexively opposed to progress - because otherwise, as a reasoned and a reasonable man, he would be obliged to acknowledge The Other Lot might at least some of the time have a valid point. Worse, Our Lot might at least some of the time be wrong...

Fortunately, he was an emic anthropologist, and not an etic one.

[gooddecisions]

Jul 1, 2014 12:24:16 GMT -5 Lizard King said:

Jul 1, 2014 11:57:44 GMT -5 gooddecisions said:

Why do people vote tea party? They are bunch of hillbilly, uneducated, anarchist haters.

And this is how Haidt used to feel about it, because his political conditioning led him to believe there were no good ideas on the other side of the fence. It simply had to be the case that The Other Lot were hateful, ignorant, reactionary, and reflexively opposed to progress - because otherwise, as a reasoned and a reasonable man, he would be obliged to acknowledge The Other Lot might at least some of the time have a valid point. Worse, Our Lot might at least some of the time be wrong...

Fortunately, he was an emic anthropologist, and not an etic one.

I was really just making a point that there really isn't an "good choice". I don't have a party and feel that an easy argument can be made on all our options, unfortunately. I guess that's politics for you.

[djAdvocate]

i vote Republican because i am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal.  it is hard to find that combination in the other major party.

that having been said, i have yet to vote for a WINNING candidate that had this combination.

that will be the day that i truly feel represented.

[Lizard King]

I take your point, gooddecisions. Party politics mitigates against the "good choice," even when political parties proliferate. A Democrat like John Barrow has more in common with a Republican like Thad Cochran than he does a Democrat like Elizabeth Warren (for example, he has no Cherokee heritage whatsoever). But his identity as a Democrat overrides everything else in many instances.

In a two-party state, dialog is essential to the functional and orderly conduct of the business of state. Where dialog breaks down, dysfunction and disorder follow.

A dialog that starts "Hey, for a hillbilly, uneducated, anarchist hater, you've got a point" is not off to a swimmingly good start.

It's equally true that yelling out, "you lie!" during the President's SOTU address is not a helpful contribution. The persistent invocation of strawmen in the President's defense, likewise. The persistent demonization of his accomplishments by the opposition, again likewise.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could all operate on the assumption that our idiosyncratic moralities might be wrong?

[Lizard King]

Jul 1, 2014 12:31:30 GMT -5 djAdvocate said:

i vote Republican because i am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal.  it is hard to find that combination in the other major party.

that having been said, i have yet to vote for a WINNING candidate that had this combination.

that will be the day that i truly feel represented.

You're just in the wrong part of the country. 'Blue Dog' Democrats are a Southern breed, and there's a smattering of them still left. One's my Congressman, for example.

[Deleted]

I know anarchists that vote. They were very happy yesterday.

[djAdvocate]

Jul 1, 2014 12:47:09 GMT -5 Lizard King said:

Jul 1, 2014 12:31:30 GMT -5 djAdvocate said:

i vote Republican because i am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal.  it is hard to find that combination in the other major party.

that having been said, i have yet to vote for a WINNING candidate that had this combination.

that will be the day that i truly feel represented.

You're just in the wrong part of the country. 'Blue Dog' Democrats are a Southern breed, and there's a smattering of them still left. One's my Congressman, for example.

i don't know many Southern politicians that can rightfully be called "social liberals".

[Lizard King]

i don't know many Southern politicians that can rightfully be called "social liberals"

As long as you rightfully define "social liberal" in the gotcha terminology of hot-button issues that anybody who could rightfully be called "fiscally conservative" wouldn't see any business of government being involved in the first place, I can see your difficulty.

[djAdvocate]

Jul 1, 2014 12:53:16 GMT -5 Lizard King said:

i don't know many Southern politicians that can rightfully be called "social liberals"

As long as you rightfully define "social liberal" in the gotcha terminology of hot-button issues

not feeling very generous today?  i am betting i define "social liberal" the same way you do.  i don't give a f*&k about the press monkeys and what they think social liberalism is.  you should know that, jim.

on the economic side, most Republicans can be relied upon for being as liberal as they come.  when i say "social liberalism is largely absent in the GOP" i am referring to being a strong advocate of civil rights such as gay rights, worker rights, women's rights, prisoner rights, etc.  but i am also referring to advocating strongly for freedom of speech, freedom of religion (including the freedom to practice anything that is NOT Christian, or nothing at all), and freedom of assembly.  i don't see a lot of that in the South.  but you have the bird's eye view.  show me i am wrong.

that anybody who could rightfully be called "fiscally conservative" wouldn't see any business of government being involved in the first place, I can see your difficulty.

horsefeathers.  fiscal conservatives are not "anti-government".  they are anti-waste, anti fraud, anti "spending on stuff that we can't afford" (ie- the most opulent military in the world by a factor of FOUR).  there are Republicans out there that fit this mold.  but they tend to be marginalized by the party, which is why i am tempted to jump ship.  though this recent change in the House has me thinking twice about that idea.

[happyhoix]

'Blue Dog' Democrats are a Southern breed,

Very few left. They emerged back when the southern working man had to be defended against the rich northern snobs, but when the dems began pushing for racial equality in the sixties the dems began to loose the South.

I live in the heart of the Bible belt, in a rural area, so I'm surrounded by die hard republican/ TEA party people, and I understand them, although I don't agree with them on most things. They feel that the hard working middle class is being overwhelmed by a greedy lower class that refuses to work and always has a hand out, and that the federal government does nothing but impose greater restrictions and taxes. Many of them look around and see the progress the gays have made towards marriage equality, the increasing presence of Hispanics and blacks at all levels of society (and not just as the working class laborers) and the progress women have made in the workplace and they feel that their traditional lifestyle is under attack. They are afraid, and egged on by conservative talking heads predicting the worst, they are certain the American way of life is doomed, the country guaranteed to either plunge into chaos and anarchy or simply become a Spanish speaking 3rd world, inferior country.

[Lizard King]

Consensus: Republicans really do vote out of fear, bigotry, and ignorance...

Can I really be the only one who sees that as an unhelpful consensus?

Can we at least broaden it to - people vote out of fear, bigotry, and ignorance? If not, what are we to make of the Democratic Party's strategy for encouraging contributions and voter engagement during the election cycle? Is it not based entirely on stoking fear, pandering to prejudice, and reducing complex issues to soundbites, every bit as much as its Republican counterpart?

[Sum Dum Gai]

or simply become a Spanish speaking 3rd world, inferior country.

Living in the border states my whole life, it sure seems like we're making some pretty big strides in that direction.  Somebody from the midwest probably doesn't see it, and thinks I'm being a racist asshole or whatever.  That's part of the problem in this country.  Geographically we're huge and different parts of the country see different things as a huge deal.  For example, I don't pay much attention to what's in the latest farm bill, or how they tinker with corn subsidies.  It has almost zero impact on our local economy.  For people in Iowa that's not true at all, while the border situation might seem trivial.

[happyhoix]

Can we at least broaden it to - people vote out of fear, bigotry, and ignorance?

I would agree that there are dems that also vote out of fear, bigotry and ignorance.

Just as there are a lot of Republicans who vote that way for other, very reasonable reasons - a wish to contain the federal budget, a wish to contain federal power and promote states rights, a wish to maintain a powerful military in the face of a relentless terrorist activity and unrest in the middle east.

[Lizard King]

This is going to sound patronizing, alas.

I wish everybody here was as reasonable as happyhoix.

Maybe it sounds less patronizing if I confirm I include myself, there. I aspire to be more like you, happyhoix

[Phoenix84]

I haven't read all of it, but the author makes some good points.

One annoying thing that some democrats/liberals seem to perpetuate is this idea that they're smarter than everyone else.  Some seem to think that conservatives are simple minded, uneducated, and frankly "dumber." Talking and acting like that doesn't make you smarter, it just makes you an ass.

One thing I'm interested in is how these perceptions that conservatives/republicans are dumb and racist came about.

I haven't studied a great deal of political history in this regard, but a casual overview shows that Martin Luther King was a republican, as were most of the civil rights leaders of the 1960's.  Both democrats and republicans voted against the civil rights act of 1964, largely along north/south lines.  Al Gore's own father (a democrat) voted against it.  Abraham Lincoln, the one who freed the slaves was a republican.

I wouldn't say the republicans race record is spotless, but I'm confused as to where this perception came about.  It must have been relatively recent.

[Phoenix84]

I suppose in the grand scheme of things, I vote for the republicans because I feel they respect personal liberty more than democrats, and they seem to be more "realistic" party.

As the OP put it, to me, democrats seem like idealists, not realists. They get so fixated in lofty goals that are never really truly achievable, like "equality" and "fairness" and "affordable healthcare for everyone." All worthy goals, but either something I don't think you can legislate or are simply not possible given the reality of limited resources.

With the exception of reproductive rights, republicans seem to take a far more "hands off" approach, and respect personal liberty. Democrats want to regulate everything from the cars you drive to the sodas you drink.

[dondub]

Just as there are a lot of Republicans who vote that way for other, very reasonable reasons - a wish to contain the federal budget, 

The Reagan and Bush/Bush deficits would be proof enough for me that is just so much smoke.

a wish to contain federal power

except the government always grows when they are in charge and BushCo. activated what the NSA is now up to  

and promote states rights,

this is dog whistle for White People's Rights if one chooses to review history

a wish to maintain a powerful military in the face of a relentless terrorist activity and unrest in the middle east.

The Demos have also been strong on the military, all lying from the right aside. However, the Repo invasion of Iraq has not stabilized the Middle east and has created thousands of additional terrorists. Thanks a bunch.

[Lizard King]

People will tell you there was this big seismic shift in the 1960s where white Democrats fled to the Republican party, which by the Reagan era of "welfare queens" was overtly racist. That is an oversimplification, in my view.

The mirror-image of that oversimplification has it that the civil rights movement initially championed by Martin Luther King was moving in directions he wasn't happy with by the time of his assassination, and carried on moving in those directions apace in the succeeding decades. A commitment to civil rights for blacks in practice amounted to throwing money at them without really addressing their problems, and stoking class-conflict perspectives whenever anybody tried to evaluate these programs on their merits.

The problem is, we do have racists in this country, and other bigots besides. We do have blatant vote-buying programs, and we do have blatant rabble-rousing rhetoric. These ills are more associated with one party or another in the popular mind, but the casual racism of Joe Biden or Harry Reid regarding candidate Barack Obama back in 2008, with his apparently astonishing cleanliness and articulateness and not sounding like a Negro at all - for that matter, the casual dog-whistle sexism of Obama's own campaign, both during the primary against Hillary Clinton and in the general against Sarah Palin - is as illustrative as the hypocrisy of Vance McAllister, the skullduggery of Michael Grimm, and the earmarking of Ron Paul that these are not party-specific ills. They're systemic ills.

My answer to your question, Phoenix84, is that the bulk of people who graduate from universities tend to vote Democratic; and the bulk of people who graduate from universities tend to feel intellectually superior to Joe Schmo. It's my belief that the education system, a bastion of strength for the oxymoronic government union, serves a vital function for the political left in indoctrinating the nation's youth. Haidt suggests that the moral dimensions of care/harm and fairness/reciprocity dominate the moral philosophy of the political left; I don't think it's an accident that these are far more immediate concerns for the average five year old than Haidt's other dimensions of ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.

Please don't misunderstand that as me suggesting left-wingers have the moral development of five-year-olds. Most left-wingers of my acquaintance have a strongly developed moral sense, but one very much after the lineage of Mill and Bentham and Rawls. Few left-wingers of my acquaintance have any truck with the arguments of Robert Nozick; but fewer still can materially rebut those arguments as an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional response. That's because the morality lessons that pervaded their schooling are essentially utilitarian, and those lessons took and became part of their self-concept. As Haidt also says, once you have an emotional connection to an idea, it becomes much easier to interpret everything else in terms of that idea, and much easier to outgroup everything that doesn't accord with that idea. Hence the "Republicans are dumb" trope reinforces the idea that "Democrats are smart," which you'd be an odd Democrat indeed not to feel a bit warm and fuzzy about - well done you, choosing to line up with the smart guys - and obviates the need to actually engage with arguments from the political right.

It's usually quite demanding for any of us to really engage with arguments across that divide, because the differences are at the level of definitions. I, as a Republican, would be considered "stupid" by many Democrats because I do not recognize many of the terms they use as meaning what, to Democrats, they mean in their plain sense - words like "freedom," or "right," or "responsibility," or "fairness," for example. It's easy for me to decry them for exactly the same reason. We're not used to thinking of the terms we use as representing multiple very different entities simultaneously, but that is almost inevitably the work they must do in political discourse.

[Lizard King]

Jul 1, 2014 14:26:07 GMT -5 dondub said:

Just as there are a lot of Republicans who vote that way for other, very reasonable reasons - a wish to contain the federal budget, 

The Reagan and Bush/Bush deficits would be proof enough for me that is just so much smoke.

a wish to contain federal power

except the government always grows when they are in charge and BushCo. activated what the NSA is now up to  

and promote states rights,

this is dog whistle for White People's Rights if one chooses to review history

a wish to maintain a powerful military in the face of a relentless terrorist activity and unrest in the middle east.

The Demos have also been strong on the military, all lying from the right aside. However, the Repo invasion of Iraq has not stabilized the Middle east and has created thousands of additional terrorists. Thanks a bunch.

This is the kind of tribal response that inhibits dialog. It is very hard to believe that dondub actually thinks all Republicans supported everything the Bush administration did, for example; Bush was, at that time, President of the entire United States, not just its Republican cohort, and I'm certain dondub is in no doubt that the entire United States did not agree with the Bush administration on anything.

This is not a "four legs good, two legs better" thread. Clearly, I didn't do a good job of setting it up in the OP, and I'm not actually trying to police contributions like this out of it now. I'm commenting because it seems to me that there's a vehemence in this that stands in illustrative contrast with hoix' remarks, which to me no more validated Republicanism than dondub's do, but which did acknowledge the concept that there might exist Republicans with principle and intelligence who still preferred elements of that party's platform, or were sufficiently offput by the alternatives, that they could vote that way.

[happyhoix]

One annoying thing that some democrats/liberals seem to perpetuate is this idea that they're smarter than everyone else. Some seem to think that conservatives are simple minded, uneducated, and frankly "dumber." Talking and acting like that doesn't make you smarter, it just makes you an ass.

I wouldn't say this is a democratic/republican thing, I think it's just what happens when people disagree.

Some people think if they dress up their argument with big words and obscure references they will win - or as I call it, overwhelm with bullshit.  I don't know that the dems are any more guilty of that then the republicans.

Listen to Rush pontificate about how smart and wise he is, and how everyone who disagrees with him is an idiot - Bill Maher does the same thing on the left. You just notice it more when the person doing it is has the opposite point of view from you. 

[happyhoix]

These ills are more associated with one party or another in the popular mind, but the casual racism of Joe Biden or Harry Reid regarding candidate Barack Obama back in 2008, with his apparently astonishing cleanliness and articulateness and not sounding like a Negro at all - for that matter, the casual dog-whistle sexism of Obama's own campaign, both during the primary against Hillary Clinton and in the general against Sarah Palin - is as illustrative as the hypocrisy of Vance McAllister, the skullduggery of Michael Grimm, and the earmarking of Ron Paul that these are not party-specific ills. They're systemic ills.

I would argue that lately, maybe in the last 25 years, the Republican party has invested a lot of time and effort in two things - gerrymandering districts to create areas guaranteed to vote Republican and pushing for restrictions on the ability to vote.

Both these activities appear to be targeted against the poor and non white populations.

Add to that the Republican opposition to immigration reform, which impacts the Hispanic community.

The republicans like to talk about how they want to be the big tent party, but mostly, they're the white male party.  

[happyhoix]

Jul 1, 2014 14:01:42 GMT -5 Lizard King said:

This is going to sound patronizing, alas.

I wish everybody here was as reasonable as happyhoix.

Maybe it sounds less patronizing if I confirm I include myself, there. I aspire to be more like you, happyhoix

Umm, I think you are pulling my leg, or else you've missed some of my more pissy tantrums.

[Lizard King]

Some people think if they dress up their argument with big words and obscure references they will win - or as I call it, overwhelm with bullshit. I don't know that the dems are any more guilty of that then the republicans.

I think as a pure numbers game there are more academic leftists by probably two orders of magnitude than academic rightists. It is simply damn hard to get tenure if you don't speak the right shibboleths. Institutions like to keep a token right-winger on staff, and some value a tradition of independent thought and so have controversialists in the faculty who often tend to espouse right-wing positions; but the bulk of the intelligentsia in this country, in most countries, is left-wing. They're called the liberal arts for a reason.

In the same way, the bulk of opinion editorialists view the world through a leftist prism. I'm aware that most people understand that leftist prism as centrist, because they're confusing normativity with neutrality; from where I sit, which is admittedly pretty hard right a lot of the time, it's substantially left of where the center could reasonably be placed. There isn't even a pretence at even-handedness: Vox is a great example of a journalistic enterprise by smart, able people that is hopelessly constrained by the implicit and unacknowledged biases of its writers.

So: I agree that intellectual leftists are not more guilty than intellectual rightists of this sort of thing; they're just far more numerous, and have a higher profile. The right is represented by readily-caricatured self-aggrandizing mouthpieces like Ann Coulter, because it's very easy to preserve the "Republicans are dumb" trope with the likes of her representing the movement.