procrastinate more!
Well said.....
It might depend on how you define "interest." Is interest always or only economic (as Thomas Frank and many liberal critics seem to assume)? I think an implicitly economic definition of interest underlies the assumptions about middle and upper class white voters in red vs. blue states -- maybe by defining interest more broadly we could foster the kind of cross-race affiliations that might help us to escape the dichotomy.
Yes, I was using "interest" in a slippery way -- in economic terms at first, and then (though it may not have been obvious) in a broader sense.
That "why do people vote against their interests" question does come from Tom Frank, though I haven't read his Kansas book. Has anyone else? (Anyone who's reading this, I mean...all two of you.)
Haven't read the Tom Frank book -- but the NY Sunday Times was critical of its vulgar economism -- they point out that to assume interest always coincides with material gain results in an unhelpful liberal condescension towards poor and rural conservatives (not to mention, I would add, an undertheorized notion of false consciousness).
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