His Holiness, The Pope wrote:
Maybe one of you smarties like Agentwood or Blue Order can sort this one out for me, but why is it that so many Republicans supporters are people like poor farmers and wage laborers, even though Democrats are more in favor of welfare and a social security net that would help support and subsidize those same poor people! Guess it just proves that family values and olde tyme relijun are more important to some people than having enough money to support their non-aborted children.
Since I was asked, I think I'll hijack this thread to answer the original question.
I think there's some sort of innate tendency towards conservatism in our species. Maybe it's biological, in that conservative behavior tends to (but does not guarantee to) result in survival. I don't know. But human societies on the whole tend to be conservative. Of course, that means different things in different societies. Conservative pagan cultures resisted Christianity. Conservative Christian cultures resist multi-culturalism. Conservative Muslims resist western social values. Conservative American capitalists resist socialism. Conservative Russian socialists resist capitalism.
There also tends to be an urban-rural divide worldwide, with rural communities espousing traditional values, and urban communities embracing change. It probably has something to do with the cosmopolitan nature of urban communities, being exposed to other ways of thinking, not seeing one way of thinking as the "only way."
In the U.S., contemporary conservative values tend to be social conservatism (as distinguished from economic conservatism), with the agenda set by conservative Christian churches. I remember seeing recently that one church, or perhaps one televangelist-- can't remember which-- told its congregation to vote based on their conservative Christian beliefs (I'm differentiating here between conservative Christian beliefs and Christian beliefs), and not on their pocketbooks.
I think there's also some interesting psychology-- which I'm not qualified to comment on at length-- going on among the wage laborers who support fiscal policies antithetical to their own interests. One element of this psychology is a sense of self-reliance that plays out like this: "I bust my ass all day long to put food on the table, and I'll be damned if I'm going to work and pay taxes so some mofo who's too lazy to work can sit on his ass all day." So the poor wage laborer and the poor farmer vote for the guy who promises to cut taxes for the wealthy by sticking it to the poor.
Another element of that psychology is the disdain for the poor that grew out of protestantism. Under the doctrine of pre-determination, which came out of Calvinism, it was believed that most of humanity was pre-determined to eternal damnation, and that only a select few souls would be saved. People wanted to know if they would be saved, or condemened to eternal damnation, so they looked for signs of God's grace. The obvious sign of God's grace, it was believed, was wealth. So the wealthy were considered to have received God's grace, and the poor were considered to be predestined to hell. Read Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This belief in pre-determination led to a contempt for the poor, and was the foundation of pre-revolutionary American society.
One final interesting note about the psychology of voting against one's own interests is the American belief in upward mobility, coupled with a discounting of social class as a phenomena that tends to determine outcome. This belief in upward mobility leads to a denial about the realities of one’s own economic status, and thus, creates the circumstances which facilitate the ability of poor wage laborers and farmers to vote against their own economic interests.
Darwin and think ID is bullshit. But let's be honest about what's actually happening.
