What Republican leaders object to is accepting Americans they consider inferiors as equals. (And they relish calling liberals elitists.) Those attitudes are a matter of heads and hearts so long as they don’t act on them, although those attitudes underly subtle and not so subtle discriminatory systems.
But voting? Sharing political power with people they consider inferiors? Oh, hell no!
This whole hubbub over Georgia’s voting restrictions? It’s about power shifting away from those who have more to those who have less. Georgia Republicans are not the only ones wetting their pants over the prospect of sharing power. Check out Texas:
Senate Bill 7 passed with support from all 18 Republican state senators and opposition from all 13 Democrats. The bill limits extended early voting hours, bans drive-thru voting and forbids local election officials from encouraging voters to submit vote-by-mail applications.
If signed into law, the bill would likely impact Texas’ largest cities where voters have often faced long lines during recent elections. Some of the state’s largest counties expanded early voting hours and created drive-thru polling locations to allow more people to vote in the 2020 elections.
That’s a bridge too far.
Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, expressed concerns about the effect SB 7 may have on voter turnout.
“Texas has, typically, one of the lowest turnout rates in the country to the extent that there are people that think that that’s a problem and think that there should be more participation.” Henson said. “This legislation works in the opposite direction of solving that problem.”
Many Texas Republicans believe the bigger problem is voter fraud. Supporters believe the bill will stop people from cheating in elections.
In their fevered minds.
We use race too easily as a simplfying assumption to explain such behavior as erecting barriers to voting. But it is also about power. Who has it. Who doesn’t. Who is the alpha. Who are the rest. Money is shorthand for it. So is race. Those in power mean to keep it.
Some truths are not self-evident at all. Studies confirm that the more one has, the less likely one is to accept them. The more one has, the more likely one is to be “self-oriented and more willing to behave unethically” in one’s self-interest, researcher Paul Piff tells Michael Mechanic in The Atlantic:
Political scientists such as Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens have found notable differences in the policy preferences of affluent versus middle-class Americans, not only on purely economic matters like taxation but also on public-education funding, racial equity, and environmental protections, all of which the rich have been significantly less likely to support. This matters because of the influence the rich have over government officials. In one study, Gilens, now a professor at UCLA, combed through thousands of public survey responses and discovered that, on issues where the views of wealthy voters diverged significantly from those of the rest of the populace, the policies ultimately put in place “strongly” reflected the desires of the most affluent respondents—the top-earning 10 percent. Those policies, the study concluded, bore “virtually no relationship to the preferences” of poorer Americans.
Wealthy people are less likely than poor ones, in lab settings at least, to relate to the suffering of others. When people experience compassion, it turns out, our hearts actually slow down. In 2012, Piff’s then-colleagues Michael Kraus and Jennifer Stellar hooked volunteers up to ECG machines and showed them two short videos: a “neutral” video of a woman explaining how to construct a patio wall and a “compassion” video of children receiving chemotherapy treatments for cancer. Relative to the wealthier participants, the poorer ones not only reported feeling greater compassion for the kids but also exhibited a significantly larger slowdown in heart rate from one video to the next.
If affluent people are less moved by the suffering of others, they should be less likely to help those in need, and this too seems to be true both in the lab and outside it. While wealthy families donate significantly more money to charity on average than poor families do, they tend to give away a smaller share of their income. “As wealth goes up, the stinginess seems to increase,” Piff said.
And the tendency toward being a royalist, to put it bluntly.
The psychologists Kraus and Keltner have found that people who rank themselves at the top of the social scale are significantly more likely to endorse essentialism, the notion that group characteristics are immutable and biologically determined—precisely the sort of beliefs used to justify the mistreatment of low-status groups such as immigrants and ethnic minorities. Countless studies, Kraus writes, point to an upper-class tendency toward “self-preservation.” That is, people who view themselves as superior in education, occupation, and assets are inclined to protect their group’s status at the expense of groups they deem less deserving: “These findings should call into question any beliefs in noblesse oblige—elevated rank does not appear to obligate wealthy individuals to do good for the benefit of society.”
A layperson perusing the literature on wealth and behavior might conclude that wealthy people are assholes, but that’s not really fair. “When I’m talking about these findings, it can just sound like flat-out rich-bashing, which I’m not interested in doing,” Piff said. One can be extraordinarily rich and not exhibit these patterns, or be quite poor and exhibit them. The effects that he and his colleagues describe are “small to medium,” and they are averages.
But they are real. Even toward the bottom of the social order.
We are in the end animals. So status, pecking order? It’s part of the wiring. It runs deep.