why are u.s. voters stupid?

The Daily Bell | Thomas Frank, the author of the best-selling book What's The Matter with Kansas, is an ... exasperated Democrat. He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronizing liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channeling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest. Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different: "You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

Thomas Frank thinks that voters have become blinded to their real interests "It's like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy."

As Mr. Frank sees it, authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made.

And the ultimate sin in modern politics is appearing to take the voters for granted. This is a culture war but it is not simply being driven by differences over abortion, or religion, or patriotism. And it is not simply Red states vs. Blue states any more. It is a war on the entire political culture, on the arrogance of politicians, on their slipperiness and lack of principle, on their endless deal making and compromises.

The passage above, coming toward the end of the article is, in our opinion, the real reason the article was written. The BBC generally is not a great fan of the American Republican Party and of "right wing" politics in general. The article's real thesis, from our point of view, is that "Americans are once again being lied to by the fascist right wing - which has learned to adopt an "authentic tone."

Poor BBC. They have got it wrong again. This is important because in the Age of the Internet, such propagandistic handiwork has ramifications. In fact, what is going on in America, thanks in large part to information available on the Internet, is that literally millions of people, many of them youngsters, have rediscovered classical liberalism and real republican values. The Tea Parties are an outgrowth of this discovery, though also of general American voter rage with the continued decline of civil society and living standards.

To answer the BBC's question, American voters ARE NOT voting against their interests, nor are they voting for "authenticity." What American voters are voting for increasingly is more freedom, less government, fewer taxes and a political system that is seen as working for the people rather than against them. President Barack Obama has misread the will of the voters and the "change" he was elected to provide.

The biggest and most powerful movement in the United States, as we have long predicted, is the classical liberal message of Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex). Eventually, maybe sooner rather than later, his movement (with some 250,000 members) will have signed up one million members, making it the most powerful force for freedom in America since before the Civil War. The British - the BBC and even the Telegraph - are blithely ignoring the convulsive changes that are taking place in American political life.