Self-interest no longer main voting factor

Political realism’s fundamental assumption is that self-interest trumps all. Academic studies done from this perspective assume that those who weigh all options will choose the one that gives them the maximum benefit at minimum cost.

However, many of today’s most heated political debates often reveal the fallacy of this assumption.

Alissa Masutani

Whether regarding healthcare, deficit spending or entitlement benefits, Americans today seem inclined not only to ignore their own best interests, but to actually support politicians who actively work against them.

Take the issue of entitlement benefits. If self-interest was the most powerful factor, older voters would worry more about ensuring the continuation and expansion of entitlement benefits than about deficit spending. By contrast, younger voters would be most worried about deficit spending, as they are the ones who will eventually have to foot the bill.

Logically, this should mean that older voters should lean Democratic, as that party continues to support deficit spending in order to maintain current benefits. Younger voters should subsequently affiliate with the Republican party, which is much more vocal about long-term debt issues and boasts many politicians willing to make radical changes to programs like Social Security and Medicare.

According to the Pew Research Center, however, the opposite is true.

Since 2008, the average age of Republicans has been higher than that of Democrats. Very young voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, while very old voters are overwhelmingly Republican.

The voting population’s political interests, it seems, are no longer rigidly governed by self-interest.

The most prominent example in today’s headlines of this phenomenon are the expiring tax cuts implemented by former President George W. Bush. A recent CNBC poll shows that most people  — 56 percent — believe the Obama administration’s economic policies have helped Wall Street, while only 14 percent of Americans feel that they have been helped by those policies in any way. Furthermore, 55 percent of voters are worried that the current administration’s economic plan has made things worse by raising the deficit.

Yet, the same poll shows a majority of respondents want the Bush tax cuts to be extended, even those that apply to the richest two percent of Americans. Incredibly, the same people who are angry about policies that contribute to the deficit and help the rich at the expense of the masses want to avoid taxing the rich to pay for redistribution of income — a clear violation of the principle of self-interest.

Several conclusions can be drawn from this pattern, the implications of which are certainly up for debate.

First, Americans are unable to diagnose how their own self-interests are expressed politically. People are not educated enough to be able to connect their desired consequences from government action with the policy proposals that would produce them; therefore, they often unknowingly support ideas that would work against themselves.

A second, more optimistic, theory is that Americans are not in fact self-interested. Morals and principles trump narrow economic interests, leading people to support politicians that realists would predict they would oppose.

Finally, it’s always possible that this new trend exists solely because Americans are often misled by their leaders, who convince them that certain policies will work to their benefit even when the opposite is true.

Call me a skeptic, but I am inclined to believe that theory No. 2 is only peripherally relevant. The United States might be a country that has frequently served as the world’s moral compass, but a majority in polls still calls the economy its main political concern.

Instead, the most important cause of this phenomenon is theory three, which is of course made possible by realist theory.

Americans are generally unable to stay educated enough about current issues to make informed, independent decisions. In a way, this is a good thing — if everyone had enough time to study every issue in depth, nothing else would get done.

Instead, busy people are forced to choose who they trust and follow that person’s lead. Frequently, that decision is made based on who agrees with someone’s position on the one issue of most importance to them; for example, people who are passionate about a contentious social issue like gay rights will be attracted to politicians, commentators and analysts who share their views in that area. They will then be predisposed to believe what that person says about issues that might be completely unrelated, such as tax cuts or healthcare.

Unfortunately, these opinion leaders are leading their followers astray. Frequently holding more extreme views than the generally moderate American public, figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and Keith Olbermann take advantage of their audience’s trust in order to misrepresent issues and skew perceptions.

Perhaps the conclusion that can be drawn, then, is not that self-interest is a non-factor in Americans’ policy stances, but that opinion leaders’ ability to pursue their own interests more vigorously than the busy general public is skew the discourse and harm the common goals that most people share.

Daniel Charnoff is a senior majoring in  international relations (global business). His column, “Through the Static,” runs Wednesdays.