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Read an article earlier in the week that gave me a different perspective to my usual big city liberal views and it stuck with me.
It attempted to explain how some of the traditional Democrat base flipped to Republican. When we talk about voting against their own best interest it's usually about Democrats wanting to give them more social safety nets while Republicans want to take them away. If you're just surviving off free stuff then wouldn't even more free stuff be even better? The somewhat blindspot to me is they don't want to survive or live slightly better on free stuff. They want to work and not depend on free stuff, have some value. This is where the Democrats have largely failed.
Promising to protect jobs in a dead, dying, or financially infeasible industry is unrealistic no matter which side of the isle is telling that to you, but what Democrats have offered is either retrain or educate yourself at great expense or hope we can get you better free stuff. At some point it does fall on the individual, and that is probably more realistic, but up until fairly recently Democrats advertised themselves as the party of the working class and after decades of buying that only to see things get incrementally worse it's not so much about voting against their own self interests as it is voting for their self interests in the past and not getting results. And since we exist in a two party system there really isn't any other option other than to stop enabling the party that hasn't delivered.
It attempted to explain how some of the traditional Democrat base flipped to Republican. When we talk about voting against their own best interest it's usually about Democrats wanting to give them more social safety nets while Republicans want to take them away. If you're just surviving off free stuff then wouldn't even more free stuff be even better? The somewhat blindspot to me is they don't want to survive or live slightly better on free stuff. They want to work and not depend on free stuff, have some value. This is where the Democrats have largely failed.
Promising to protect jobs in a dead, dying, or financially infeasible industry is unrealistic no matter which side of the isle is telling that to you, but what Democrats have offered is either retrain or educate yourself at great expense or hope we can get you better free stuff. At some point it does fall on the individual, and that is probably more realistic, but up until fairly recently Democrats advertised themselves as the party of the working class and after decades of buying that only to see things get incrementally worse it's not so much about voting against their own self interests as it is voting for their self interests in the past and not getting results. And since we exist in a two party system there really isn't any other option other than to stop enabling the party that hasn't delivered.
