America: Land of Bounded Rationality

Political theorists and economists think of people in group chasing what they perceives benefiting them.  A politician promises things they want and they vote that way.  Make things more or less expensive and people will buy more or less – or none – of it.  Show certain values in an idea or a product that align with what you think a targeted group wants and they will buy your product.  Tell them you will enact laws and start programs to make their lives better and they will vote for your candidate.

But that’s not really how it works. 

Exhibit A is the support among poor country Whites for the Washington efforts to ‘Repeal and Replace’ the Affordable Care Act (aka ACA or Obamacare).  The executive and legislative branches of the American federal government are in a long slow motion assault on the health care of 20 million or more Americans. 

Man of those supporters would lose their own health care under the plan.  How is it possible for people to vote away health care that they need?  Health care for their families and friends and neighbors?  How can federal politicians think this is a good idea when they will literally be killing their own voters? 

It’s not just health care, either.  There are many supports - from food aid to tuition to not getting shafted by fraudulent for-profit colleges and universities, the list goes on – that are really helpful to White low-education voters who like to get yelled at in rallies.  They are all-in for this program.  You know, the one that will impoverish and kill them.

Why?

One reason is Bounded Rationality.  I know – it’s hard to use the word “rationality” about the MAGA crowd.  But the bounded sort fits.  Bounded rationality means that when people make decisions, they have limited information to do it with.  It also means that they have cognitive limitations, and don’t take the time (if they have any) to consider the issue.  Denizens of flyover country have all of these limitations on whatever rationality they can muster on a good day. 

But what kind of boundedness can lead people to vote directly against their own interests?  That’s not supposed to happen.  When one politician promises to improve their lot in life by measurable actions, why would they vote against that and for the politician who promises to immiserate and impoverish them?  How does that make any sense? 

Anger and racism figure in, for sure.  Far too many Americans will vote to gut a social support system that helps people who are visible minorities.  They’ll vote for politicians who will pull services they perceive as over-used by Black and Hispanic people – even when it’s their own group that the primary dependants. 

Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) showed that people will work against their own interests when they misapprehend what their true interests are.  Through a bourgeois culture, the establishment keeps people in their assigned places in society – “Cultural Hegemony” as he referred to it.  This was an important distinction because, prior to Gramsci, it was always thought to be the coercion of economics or even violence that kept the downtrodden workers in line.  Gramsci showed that the imposition of a normalcy of oppression could make even the most exploitive situations seem, somehow, okay. 

We all live simultaneously in two realities which are often polar opposites of one another.  The first is our lived experience.  We know the world through our families and close friends, our distant relations and work associates.  When the economy goes to hell and the banks start unfairly foreclosing on people, the ripple effect goes through the community.  Everybody knows.  The victims are destitute and humiliated.  The many people in their personal orbit are angry. 

How many people were screwed out of their life savings by Joker-faced greed beast Steve Mnuchin – whose OneWest bank paid millions in fines for thousands illegal foreclosures?  Through the bank-run economic meltdown that started in 2008, millions of Americans were either directly impacted or indirectly felt the bottom drop out of their lives and the lives of those around them. 

The comic book Joker never did as much damage to Gotham City as Mnuchin and his bankster friends did to the ‘average Joe’ in America.  And they’re still in charge of the economy – literally.  Mnuchin is Treasury Secretary.  That’s like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of the Emergency Room. 

Which leads to the second reality:  information.  Information is the stuff that people read and hear from far away.  What happens in the State government?  Except for a relative handful of people, only the media and the politicians know what goes on or how it impacts different groups.  Citizens can’t have first-hand knowledge of how representative government works – it’s too big and complex.  They rely on reporters to explain – or at least tell.  And then the politicians spin their own stories.  Who do you believe?

Why are the Robinsons being kicked off their farm?  Because of…  Who? 

There was a day when journalists at least tried to be honest.  The Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite school saw it as their most fundamental duty:  tell the truth.  Yes, there were many problems of inherent bias toward race and class and other issues.  But the mission was to clarify and inform.

That’s no longer true.  Right wing media lies nonstop.  And when they’ve been increasingly called on their lies, they turn the accusation around on their accuser:  “fake news.”  It’s so well understood that it no longer required explanation.  Rachel Maddow is a progressive commentator.  Despite a clear ideological bias, when she speaks in terms of fact, she actually uses fact.  And so on for the progressive voices in the media.

On the other side, right wing “journalists” – both in the opinion section and the news section – make up their own stories out of whole cloth.  It’s just a well understood part of the media landscape:  they lie to their viewers and readers about everything. 

So the immediate reality for MAGA people is that they are being epically screwed by powers that they cannot even name.  And they are angry.  They see people of color doing well and are more angry because they think their own happiness has been taken away by lesser beings. 

Not having any first-hand knowledge of who is killing them, they turn to politicians and the media for answers.  What do they hear?  Politicians promising prosperity if programs for ‘those people’ are cut – never mind their own reliance on those programs.  Tax cuts for the rich are really tax cuts for the lower middle class and working poor.  There’s nobody – nobody they’ll believe – to call out the lies. 

The things in their lives they can see for themselves show a constant misery.  The death rate among men in their 50’s in these states is skyrocketing due to lifestyle choices like smoking and drinking – “deaths of despair.”  Where can they turn for help?  Nowhere. 

Their private media bubble stirs up their rage about women and people of color.  It gives them rage politicians like the Orange Jell-O.  They are pointed in directions that only lead them to further despair because the Republican Party cannot and will never make their lives better. 

The more they win the more they lose.

They rabidly support politicians who are promising to take away their health care.  They are given magic beans of tax cuts that have never grown a tree no matter where they’ve been planted.  They don’t know any better and they never will, because their Culture forces them to refuse reality.  Republicans threw away truth decades ago, along with any sense of honor or decency that went with it. 

The put the Orange Lie Machine in charge because it sounded as mad as they were.  And it made the same noises as Fox and Drudge and Breitbart.  That’s all they know. 

Sadly, that’s all they can know.