Have you read Goldy’s piece in the paper this week, on the rural republican welfare queens of Washington State? You should.
Indeed, if Washington is a welfare state, it is residents in these mostly rural, mostly Eastern, mostly Republican counties who are the biggest beneficiaries, while taxpayers here in the blue parts of the state are left footing the bill. And while your typical liberal Seattleite might be neither surprised nor disturbed at this revelation, the degree of the gap between who benefits from state government and who pays for it may come as a bit of a shock.
Goldy goes on to elaborate, with numbers and figures, the sheer extent of this disparity—Liberal King County only receives 62 cents on every dollar sent to the state, rural republican ferry county devours $3.16 for every dollar they send to the state. Goldy lays out the central paradox here: The very voters about to suffer the most from cuts in the State government are voting with fanaticism for these same cuts. He attributes this voting pattern, implicitly, to ignorance on the part of rural voters.
I have an alternative hypothesis. Rural voters vote against the State out of spite; they’d rather see the entire enterprise fail than Seattle succeed.
In the Odyssey of my medical education over the past few years—taking me, among others, to deeply red Southern / rural King County and Alaska—I’ve been slowly recognizing this pattern.
A good chunk of the country, particularly the deep red parts, feels a genuine and deep despair about their role in the new world that is emerging around us. A good many of rural and suburban Washingtonians feel like the world is leaving them behind—with some accuracy in their assessment.
In contrast, Seattleites are relatively well positioned for the globalizing world: Multicultural, multilingual, highly educated and plain old competitive on a global stage in a way that rural America has fought against at every step. Much of this advantage comes from the very programs cut or being cut right now, thanks to the troglodyte voting patterns: King County’s exemplary public health system, a well developed refugee integration program, high quality and low-cost schools from Kindergarden (previously full-day) to graduate school, a world-quality public hospital (Harborview) and cultural institutions.
Put yourself in Ferry County—with all seven thousand or so of your peers. How optimistic would you feel about your future prospects? A glorious future for your offspring in the meth production and consumption industries? Fuck ’em all, you might think. If I’m going down, those liberal assholes in Seattle are going down too.
Mark Ames and I agree on this. In a lovely essay, recently updated, Mark lays out the case for spite with damning precision.
Why do so many working- and middle-class white males vote against what is obviously their own best interests?
I can tell you why. They do so out of spite. Put your ear to the ground in this country, and you’ll hear the toxic spite churning…
Spite-voters also lack the sense that they have a stake in America’s future. That’s another area that separates the spite-bloc’s way of thinking from the progressive-left that wants to help them. There is something proprietary implied in all of the didacticism and concern found in the left’s tone—and they do all have that grating, caring tone, it’s built into the foundations of their whole structure. But consider this: The left struggles to understand why so many non-millionaire Americans vote Republican, and yet they rarely ask themselves why so many millionaires, particularly the most beautiful and privileged millionaires in Manhattan and Los Angeles, vote for the Democrats.
I can answer both. Rich, beautiful, coastal types are liberal precisely because their lives are so wonderful. They want to preserve their lives exactly as they are. If I were a rich movie star, I’d vote for peace and poverty relief. War and domestic insurrection are the greatest threats to their already-perfect lives—why mess with it? This rational fear of the peasantry is frequently misinterpreted as rich guilt, but that’s not the case. They just want to pay off all the have-nots to keep them from storming their manors and impaling them on stakes.
You should read it all.
Spite?
Or is it .. envy?
“Why do so many working- and middle-class white males vote against what is obviously their own best interests?
“
Because you continually call them idiots and look down on them through your latte stained glasses? Because they know you’re more interest in defending the rights of some sexual subset of freaks than working class straight white males?
@2: Let me help you, by condensing my counter-argument.
I don’t think conservatives in Washington State are idiots. I think they’re spiteful assholes, who would gladly guarantee their failure, provided they could bring down a few ‘latte stained glasses’ wearing liberals who spend their time ‘defending the rights of some sexual subset of freaks’.
Think I got it right?
I’m pretty sure that the 7-thousand-or-so people in Ferry County are too inbred to know the difference. (Says the girl raised in Okanogan.)
Assholes? Good luck getting their votes.
Either way, keeps my taxes down.
You know 1098 lost in King County too? And 1053 passed in King? You know that, right?
I posit a different theory. They vote against their own self interest out of a misplaced sense that they are doing the right thing for the country. They hear all day on talk radio that tax cuts for the rich are going to make jobs for them, that cutting the gov’t services will save them money, etc. All these lies are to get them to support the interests of greedy rich republicans and their corporate profits. When the reality sets in that a tax cut for the rich is a tax hike for them, that those services kept their kids in school and their parents off the bread line, then it’s time to blame the damned liberals!
Jon I have brought your Wasilla post up to Goldy on numerous occasions, glad to see you bringing it up again here. I grew up in the Tri-cities and I saw this group think all the time. You just can’t point out that 60% of the economy is government supported there without being called many unsavory names. I posted the Goldy article to my FB yesterday and got some of my ultra-republican friends to at least talk about this. They hate the federal government employees, even though they worked for the government in one form or another for, in some cases, up to 47 years. It’s a circular thought pattern that I can only attribute to self hate. They have an ideology that points in one direction, yet they all work in positions that contradict that belief. Voting against their own self interest is the act of flagellation they perform to atone for their lot in life.
Isn’t this true of conservatives in general? Holding the whole country back to make sure nothing undeserved comes to the elitist liberal queers and the poor (who could pull themselves out of poverty if they really tried).
So when will sPokane look like Mogadishu ?
So, this is basically suddenly realizing that not all pirates are, in fact, completely logical?
My point being, of course, that it’s the rich new-media-using etc etc on the conservative side who’re leading the charge too, in any case.
But then shouldn’t African Americans have been a reliable conservative vote too? Out of spite. Or Hispanics. Or gays? Or women? For decades their prospects looked much worse than the guys out in Eastern Washington feeling sorry for themselves, so where is their spite?
The theory that you vote liberal because the world works for you falls flat on its face if you look at the spectrum of liberal voters. The largest blocs are people whose lives are not all that wonderful. They’re trying to change things to make life better for themselves.
I think the reason rich beautiful coastal urbanites side with so many disadvantaged minorities against conservatives is simply that they had to get an education to get where they are. The more you know, the harder it is to cling to reactionary beliefs.
Although I suppose spite could explain Clarence Thomas.
I still stand by my idea of King County becoming our own state. Fuck the rest of Washington!!
My entire conservative, extended family lives in either Whitman or Lewis County, and Jonathan is right. I’d also throw in a bit of envy, fear of change, and shame at having to rely so much on government help and employment to have anything resembling a first world existence.
@14 We could at least dump everything east of the mountains. They’re dead weight, and they don’t want to be associated with us anyway.
Or, can the blue counties of Western Washington elect to be annexed by Canada?
Hey Cato, you know king county voted down 1098 right? And voted majority for 1053? You know those ‘facts’ right?
Write to your state representatives: Western Washington Money Stays in Western Washington!!!
Anything else is SOCIALISM!!!!
Jonathan…
I don’t disagree that there is a fair amount of spite involved in all this—I’ve frequently written about the “fuck Seattle” attitude guiding voters throughout much of the state—but I gotta believe there is at least some room for persuasion… else there’s really no point to covering such issues, and Washington is hopelessly on the path toward becoming Mississippi.
@20, the entire country’s hell bent on becoming Mississippi.
“Washington is hopelessly on the path toward becoming Mississippi.”
Given up on the Somalia meme ladies? And why does a return to the 2008 budget make us Mississippi? Wouldn’t we need to go back to 1994’s budget and add three million blacks?
Has anyone noticed that the right wing trolls don’t have the balls to become registered users on Slog?
@Cato, it’s a well documented conservative tactic: you flood websites with liberal leanings and frankly troll the place. Fortunately, the good folks at the Stranger allow us to filter out unregistered user comments so we don’t have to deal with those who lack the courage to register and be accountable for what they say.
You still haven’t told me how long til we look like Mogadishu on the Sound or the Mississippi Delta? Any estimates til we see Technicals packed with armed Somalis on Capitol Hill?
Over the past 6 months the leaders of Germany, England and France have said that multiculturalism is a failure. And most recently, a black Republican who was ushered into Congress by the Tea Party said the same thing at CPAC.
How are rural folks who dont like the Balkanization of America gonna get left behind? What positives have multiculturalism contributed to Western Culture over the past 50 years? Multicultists are egalitarian leftists who believe all cultures are equal, but Western Culture is superior to that of all other cultures and the lack of assimilation from 3rd world retards only regresses our culture.
California, Illinois and New York, our biggest, bluest, multicult, welfare states are on the verge of toppling, and the economic carnage that will be left in their wake will be worse than anything America has ever seen. Open border, welfare state leftists are the architects of our current dysgenic dystopia, with Mexifornia being their Golden Gate Bridge of design.
Multiculturalism is all but dead, and just like the Wops did with Mussolini, I’ll be cheering on in the streets when its worthless corpse is desecrated.
You know how Republicans like to attack the strengths of their oponents? I think this maps to conservative leaders like Limbaugh saying that Obama and the Dems hate America and want to destroy it. It is they who hate America and want to destroy it, and Basehead @26 is more evidence.
29, Not a big Limbaugh fan, anyone who licks Romney’s boots is suspect.
But you didn’t rebut anything I said. Give me all the benefits of multiculturalism? If your argument is more intellectually sound to a hayseed like me, I’ll take it to heart. But something tells me that you dont have the smarts to outwit Theodore Dalrymple, Mark Steyn, Heather Mac Donald and Pat Buchanan, amongst other conservative intellects, who are much more intelligent than El Rushbo, to sway my mind.
Americans make a big show of being self-sufficient. Many people would prefer to fall down under their own power than stand up with the help of another.
This also fits into their notion that by getting rid of big gub’ment agencies such as the EPA, that they will be somehow be better off— even as they contract cancer from the workplace or where they live downstream from the plant..
There’s another large part of the working-class voting against their interests that hasn’t come up yet.
Evangelical christianity.
They (the evangelicals… maybe not so many in Washington, but the south is packed to the gills with them), they firmly believe that they are put on Earth to suffer, and suffering leads to humility, and humility leads to salvation. They think rich Hollywood types (i.e., atheists) don’t have enough humility. Voting is the only thing they can do to force their brand of humility upon them.
Plus, they believe they are going straight into Jeebus’ arms after they die, so what do they care if their life is shit here. In fact, almost all of them believe the Second Coming will happen in their lifetime, and the worse the world looks, the closer they are to The Rapture. They probably have an orgasm every time a republican cuts funding to an orphanage… sure sign that the end is near and they’ll see their boyfriend Jesus that much sooner.
@33:
OR, why not just let all humans outside of King County fend for themselves, like they keep screaming they would rather do, if’n only the big, bad gubbamint would let them?
In a way, it is similar to the seemingly weekly stories of familial murder/suicide. The suicide bombing has become domesticated and is used as a reaction to unhappiness. It’s as if people are declaring, ‘I’m in dispair, so we are all going to die, whether you want to or not.” It’s nihilistic on every level.
@26-first, let’s just get it out of the way. You’ve indeed achieved your objective of coming on a relatively liberal blog and spouting empty trollish vitriol–you’re an unabashed Asshole. With a capital A.
Second, those people are conservative members from *Europe* (to think: dicks like you would refer to comments by Limeys and Frogs–Freedom Fries!)–a continent with well-defined ethnicities reacting to immigration. This country, whose blue states you’ve already admitted to hating (yes, you hate America) is different. Now I’ll employ the biggest hypocrisy used by moronic fascists in your vein and say, “If you don’t like this country or its people, live somewhere else!”
I was having a conversation about this earlier today. There’s something about lower/middle class Americans wanting to tear down people who rise above their station rather in life than building themselves up. And yet poor conservatives and tea partiers support the corporate elite as though they have some divine right to rule.
Sometimes I think we never left the middle ages.
Spite certainly isn’t a new phenomenon. My father grew up in Centralia in the forties and fifties, and people used to rant about the evils of Seattle all the time then, too.
That said, though, I just wanna go on record as mentioning (ahem) that both Spokane and Whitman Counties were blue in 2008. Baby steps.
Hey, why doesn’t Goldy have a “Stranger Staff” tag on his comments? Hasn’t he survived his probationary period? Has he not perform the ritual blowing of jobs required for full staffer status? Needs to buy yet another round of duck farts for Keck and Savage?
If you’re at least middle class on the proverbial ladder, it’s just practical to be economically progressive. Don’t get me wrong, I also think it’s the right thing to do (the idea that we all do better when we all do better…and doing that by distributing wealth around a bit), but I also think that it means we don’t have to live in gated communities.
Your Urb is an anachronism:
What we see with Republicans is that these “Government Services” are not ones they request, but which have been put upon them (maybe by duplicitous Democrats who hoped to buy off their votes for their own big budget projects.
Also, I note that you mention return on the dollar. However, what you do not mention is aggregate dollars. So, the crafty Lib might stick a “bridge to nowhere” in a Republican county and say “look…see what I did…now vote for inner city transit…”
@39-you are so right about the tearing down bit. It seems like many of those you mentioned practically foam at the mouth when they hear about public employees (for example) getting what I consider “normal” middle class benefits. You’d think they were being served caviar and champagne in the cafeteria and being driven home in limos (highly cliched wealth markers, I know) when in actuality they’re probably living very modest lives. I feel good when others that reside in the broad swath of middle class get great benefits…we all do better when we all do better.
State worker health benefits = royal screw over, while corporate excess (excess beyond imagination for most) hardly raises concern.
Having lived for several years in the just-post-Jim Crow by law, but still-Jim-Crow by fact, south I think Ames is spot on in his observations re spite.
The absolute worst of the racists were the poorest whites, who were manipulated by the likes of rich whites and political leaders like Strom Thrumond. Who, not necessarily co-incidentally, were secretly boffing black women, having kids and giving them an education that the poor whites couldn’t imagine cause they were too ignorant.
The ease with which poor, rural whites are beguiled into acting against their own best self interests is both alarming and a stunning contradiction for rational actor hypotheses.
The really scary part @37 is that you actually thought your inane drivel represented some form of humor…
Jonathan is close to correct.
The reason people vote against their own interest, Republican or Democrat, is the same reason some people support, say, a sports team associated with corporations that work against their interest… It’s Their Team.
There are people who will be life long Republicans or Democrats because that’s who they’re supposed to root for, and that’s that.
Most people treat politics like laundry… something they are browbeat into studying on occasion. It’s much easier to choose a team and support them rather than try to make granular changes and give a shit. To these partisan “team” voters, it doesn’t make a difference what happens.
The latter part is the offensive part to me.. which is why I’m glad there are folks like Goldy and Golob.
I don’t expect sports nerds to care about music, or vice versa. But politics affect us all, and while I wouldn’t enforce it, someone who is happily ignorant of politics on a basic level is frustrating to me. (Boo hoo, I know.)
I think rural voters just don’t understand city culture, and conservative folks usually tend to hate anything they don’t understand.
@46: were you even AWAKE during the Aughts? which started with a coup? and then every antiwar voice being called a traitor?
and you misremember the mid-90s, when Clinton was impeached, OUT OF SPITE, by hypocrites who were cheating on their wives.
The Liberals always are screaming to Tax the Rich.
then when the rich counties get taxed they squeal like pussies.
There ARE Democrats in Ferry County.
I met them at the Democratic Party booth at the Ferry County Fair a few years ago. Now that’s bravery!
(BTW the Ferry County Fair is the cutest, tiniest little county fair that you ever saw, other than the dynamite little horse race track attached, which is where all the action is. Don’t miss the womens steer wrestling [I’m not making this up]).
It’s not just a western-WA/eastern-WA thing, either. Here in Spokane there was such strong opposition to raising the property tax to help fund libraries that the city council decided not to even put it on the ballot. (Spokesman-Review story + comment thread: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2011/fe…) The Museum of Arts & Culture is facing a lot of “museums are for rich people – let them pay for it” sentiment as it tries the same thing to make up for state funding cuts (http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2011/fe…). The satisfaction of seeing fancy-schmancy institutions in trouble is pretty thinly veiled.
Pretty much human nature; if we were all squatting in tiny mud huts some of us would start getting really pissed off at that one guy with the funny complexion having more goats than the rest of us.
Problem being; there’s loads of people out just fine with the idea of bringing us all down to the mud hut level just to satisfy that rage.
I was raised in Puyallup and lived and worked in Seattle. I see knee jerk reactions in these comments. I know there is no talking to the leftist as they perceive that everyone else is wrong. In this slog I see the usual misrepresentation of the facts and slander of those that don’t agree with the leftist linear view. To address all this misinformation would take too long for folks to read and entirely too long for me to explain. So go back to the
Little coffee café in Fremont etc. and bolster your shortsighted lazy urbane socialist views with your cronies and leave us alone. You have already done enough damage by destroying our local logging industry in Ferry County (that worked in harmony with nature) and taking our land via GMA etc. or better yet come on over and talk to the folks at the local bar about what idiots they are and you might get educated.
O and while you are at it quit signing petitions to destroy our local economy. Quit supporting the 1,000 friends the Washington wise, etc.
That all strive to destroy our economy and ability to live in Ferry County
Trying to be reasonable with socialist is like tilting at windmills.
What @14 said. Although I’d rather have Seattle become our own state so we can impose an income tax on Eastsiders and suburbanites working in Seattle.