A Quote by Gore Vidal
Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the
American political elite from the beginning.
Related Quotes
The genius of the Republicans has been how they figured out how to so polarize the middle class that we vote against our own best interests.
For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.
I do believe that freedom isn't free - but today the corporate and political right wing is trying to cheapen this truly American value. They've been cynically using the word 'freedom' to rally the American public against its own best interests.
How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It's the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It's been two hundred years at it. It's superb.
During my time as a political strategist, one of the most vexing problems was figuring out why so many people vote against their perceived interests.
The truth is there are people who are quite informed who still vote against their interests. I would argue that, as a Green Party supporter, I would argue that middle-class black people are voting against their interests oftentimes.
The psychological peer pressure that the left has employed - and deployed, actually - on young people has been overwhelmingly successful. It has created droves and droves of people that vote against what they know is right, vote against their own self-interest, in exchange for feeling good about themselves and also being immune from criticism.
The Constitution. . . illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law--all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.
The global triumph of American technology has been predicated on the implicit separation between the business interests of Silicon Valley and the political interests of Washington.
There's a huge cost in being bipartisan, a tradition started by Newt Gingrich when he took over the House in 1994 and has continued forward, that you dare not vote against the Republican Party even if you're voting against your own initiatives and your own interests.
Climate change should not fundamentally be seen as a political or partisan issue, but it has been turned into a political football primarily by the climate deniers who have a vested interested in maintaining the status quo. That includes certain industrial interests, financial interests and political interests.
People who act against their own best interests are interesting characters.
Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite - the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite.
Every senator needs to stand up and represent their constituents - not big business, not the ACLU, not activist groups, not political interests, but the American interests, the workers' interests.
It's always interesting for me that people vote against their interests.
Bannon should never have had a permanent seat on the NSC, as he is a political operative, and the NSC has traditionally been a place where American interests are considered rather than narrow Republican or Democratic interests.
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