Samizdata

Much is being made of Mitt Romney’s leaked comments to the effect that 47 per cent of America will never vote for him, because this 47 per cent depend on government hand-outs and he, Romney, has said he will cut these hand-outs.

Judging by what happened in Britain in the Thatcher years, Romney is (assuming I have it right what he said) wrong, about none of these people voting for him I mean. Here in Britain then, as in the USA now, unemployment was unprecedentedly high, and many assumed that nobody unemployed and drawing the dole would ever vote Thatcher. Yet quite a few such people did, and not just once either. They did it again and again.

Anti-Thatcherites said that this was false consciousness. These poor deluded, put-upon Conservative voters simply did not understand their own interests.

But what if such down-on-their-luck Conservative voters actually wanted jobs, even though they did not now have them? Many definitely did. What if they depended on government hand-outs, but hated this and longed for this demeaning arrangement to end? And what if, rather than blaming Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, or even if they did blame Thatcher for them having lost their old jobs, they instead focussed on the future and regarded Thatcher as a better bet than the Labour alternative for them to get new and different jobs?

Even if all that any voter ever cares about is his or her own economic interests, and damn the country, for an unemployed person in the 1980s in Britain to vote Thatcher was at least a reasonable thing to do. It was not a self-evident case of someone not knowing what was best for them. Voting for the likes of Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock (Britain’s Obamas of those times, neither of whom ever made it to Prime Minister, thank God) might merely have made unemployment even worse, and jobs even harder to come by.

My point is not that such disagreement with the more usual opinion (if you’re unemployed vote left wing) of those times was definitely correct. I merely argue that such disagreement was a reasonable judgement to make, given that it was indeed a judgement call.

The same will apply to many Americans who depend on government hand-outs now, who will likewise vote for Romney rather than Obama, because they reckon Romney is more likely to get them back on their economic feet than Obama, and because back on their economic feet is where they really, really want to be.

And this will remain true, even though Romney has just (or so I have been reading) insulted these people by accusing them of being incapable of rational thought of the sort that I have just described, and of being incapable of voting other than for Obama, like so many sheep. At least Romney is showing hatred of the arrangements that they also hate, and which Obama might well make worse, and showing determination to change those arrangements. That might count for far more, in the eyes of an unemployed person who badly wants not to be unemployed, than those insults. So, he thinks I’m a sheep. So what? I know I’m not.

Thatcher herself never made the mistake of accusing unemployed Brits of being incapable of discerning what a brilliant Prime Minister she was, for them as for all others. From where she stood, only Labour voters were in the grip of false consciousness.

How many unemployed people will vote Romney? Rather more if Romney gives them further reason to vote for him, by saying something like: if you hate being dependent on the government, vote for me, and you’ve got a better chance of getting back into paid work than if you vote for the other fellow. → Continue reading: Why people who are now unemployed and on the dole may still rationally vote Romney (despite him saying that they won’t)