Writing in Slate, Timothy Noah postulates that perhaps "working class" conservatives are insane. He can't figure out why basic working guys continue to vote for Republicans, when their "economic interests" are so clearly aligned with the Democrats. So, he presents the theory that maybe conservatives are nuts:
Let's consider another possibility, then: The working class, or at least a large segment of same, suffers from a psychological disorder.
This sort of thing is really in vogue with liberals, they have even written books and stuff wondering why we just won't get that our interests are aligned with them rather than the evil Republicans.
This reminds me, believe it or not, of a physics experiment which was simultaneously a complete failure and the most famous in history. Two Americans, Michelson and Morley, attempted in 1887 to detect the movement of the Earth through the "Aether", by looking at the difference in a beam of light as it swung through a circle. The speed of the light beam would change, you see, depending on whether it was pointed along the Earth's direction of movement, or away from it, or at right angles.
Surprise, the speed of the light beam stayed constant as it rotated through the circle. This meant, in accord with the physics of the day, that either M&M had made some mistake in constructing their gadget (and the experiment was repeated over and over), or that the Earth was standing still.
The results of this experiment stood physics on its head for a bit, as everyone created and discarded theories to explain its results. It took a patent clerk in Switzerland named Albert Einstein to arrive at the obvious (now that is) solution, that maybe the M&M experiment was exactly right, that the speed of light was a constant and that everything else--time, space--shifted to keep up. This, of course, is the starting place for the theory of special relativity.
Liberals should maybe think about that. Maybe conservative working class guys aren't insane, and maybe they are voting their interests, and maybe you could figure out what their interests are by looking at the way they vote, instead of the other way around.
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