A Quote by Gore Vidal
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the
American political elite from the beginning.
If I ever felt inclined to be timid as I was going into a room hill of people, I would say to myself, "You're the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation in the world-why should you be frightened?
It's always interesting for me that people vote against their interests.
I will vote adamantly against the interests of my district if I actually think what I am doing is going to be helpful.
Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.
I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships... the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. ...And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs
The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the 'ruling class'. The ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or, in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance the ruling class relies on academics, scholars and 'experts' to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses.
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
I shall oppose all slavery extension and all increase of slave representation in all places, at all times, under all circumstances, even against all inducements, against all supposed limitations of great interests, against all combinations, against all compromises.
People who don't vote have no line of credit with people who are elected and thus pose no threat to those who act against our interests.
Because you look at it, you know, and there's basically one set of rules that protect that industrial ruling class. That's what the governments do, that's what the religions do. They protect the interests of that industrial ruling class.
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.
My interests still are my interests. That doesn't make me a bad mother. I think that makes me a really good mother, because when I go and creatively satisfy myself and those interests, I come home satisfied.
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