While I am at it, I might as well scold the non-rich Republican voters some more: Don’t forget that the cities in our democratic and egalitarian country are divided into well-defined sections. What an American person is depends, in spite of his or her egalitarian behavior, on where he or she lives: in palaces, manor houses, gated communities, or in good, declining, bad or very bad sections of town.

If a voter merely lives in a good section of town, unless he or she votes like you do, he or she might be convinced that the dwellers of the bad and very bad sections will vote Democratic, because the Democratic party obviously is the party of those people and for those people. Who wants to side with them?

And don’t forget: many of the bad sections are inhabited by the Blacks and the Browns. When you described my original query you used the words "low income whites" which I had not used. There is a racial factor there, the heritage of slavery. And that prompts a further question of mine: Are perhaps we ourselves to blame, you and I, who vote left of center against their economic self-interest?

The pain of social change
Let me start with a story. Long ago when middle class people in a former solidly Democratic area in Boston started to vote Republican, namely for Nixon, a friend, who had lived there explained this phenomenon to me this way :

Imagine a worker, after having done a lot of overtime, has bought a house in a middle-class section of suburban Boston, and now he learns that the Democratic establishment has decided that his children are to be bused to a ghetto-school downtown. They (the Democratic leaders) send their kids to private schools that our upwardly mobile cannot afford. So he teaches the Democratic establishment a lesson as best as he can and votes for Nixon.

This was some time ago; school integration is less bitter now. But what happens in the integrated schools? Do students recognize each other's worth? Or do the Blacks form their own groups in order to protect themselves against being looked down on? And affirmative action still is felt as disadvantaging the white middle-class. Yet, in spite of all the jokes about political correctness: people do not want to be called racist even though they resent when Blacks or Browns get ahead of themselves. Voting, however, is secret. Nobody can use your ballot to accuse you of atavistic thinking.

There is social change: I see Blacks in National Parks now. For a long time they considered National Parks white enclaves. Could it be though that we are paying a political price for it? The heritage of slavery is not dead, it only has so many faces.

Intelligent and dumb candidates
Lets not be monocausal. If the hope for a better standard of living were the main reason for people to vote against their economic interest, why do they consistently vote for the dumber candidate? There is a history to this: Humphrey, Carter, Mondale, all intelligent people eager to serve the public and the common man but they became victims of the School-Busing-Republicans, of the "Reagan Democrats", and the victims of supposed victims of affirmative action. The 2000 election was an extreme example: Gore's much greater competence clearly showed during the campaign. Did that work against him?

Populism
Gore was for the death penalty. Perhaps less so than his opponent, our current President, but he came out clearly for this barbaric practice. Clinton was for the death penalty. Remember how he went home during his first presidential campaign in order to preside over the execution of a mentally incompetent human being. Gore and Clinton, highly intelligent human beings, I am sure, know better.

Since the European countries that have abolished the death penalty long ago have much lower murder rates than we, since the states with no death penalty have no higher murder rates than the ones that do execute, the deterrent argument is dead in the water. While popular support for the death penalty is waning, it is still high, over 60 % of the population.

The death penalty is an atavism. Deep, deep down in our social consciousnesses there is the awe produced by human sacrifices. Middle-class ethics has combined it with morality: sacrifice the criminal, the outsider-enemy we fear. Many movies satisfy this desire: the villain is to be killed i.e. sacrificed to Goodness.

Can you win an election against this popular belief? Probably still not in an America where violence remains a cult. Not in America where we even ignore the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. What, other than cruel, can it be to let a person live after telling him or her: we will kill you exactly four months from now at a minute after midnight.

The Question of Elites
Are the Europeans really better in that respect? I do not believe so. True, there is less of a cult of violence there, but it does exist. Left to their own devices majorities for the death penalty could probably be found in European countries.

What prevents that from happening is that Europeans still have a political elite that prevents this barbarism from being put to a vote. The parties in a parliamentarian system have hierarchies which slow down the personal rise of any politician. The necessity to prove yourself to your political peers who were subject to the same selection process fosters more of an elite consciousness than our system that tends to reward popularity more.

Elite consciousness persists in Europe even though American influence has pervaded Europe so much, and with it the idea that the only real value is the possession of money. While this has eaten into the older European political-elite-consciousness, it did not destroy it totally. France's anti-corruption trials at the present time are an effort to restore it.

Do we in America need an elite? I think the answer clearly is yes. Not an elite of wealth, certainly not a nobility in the old feudal sense, not the country club set of CEOs earning about 500 times more than the workers in their corporations, not the professors who rarely can live with each other. An elite consists of people who can balance their own self-interest and the shame that is part of self-interest. Elite consciousness means being concerned with the whole, the whole of the country, the whole of humanity, the whole of the earth, even the whole of the universe. This sounds idealistic. But we do have some, too few, but some, people who do vote against their own self-interest.

Judge White
John Ashcroft, the candidate for Attorney General, this being the price President Bush paid to the religious Right, is criticized because he accused a state appellate judge to be appointed to a Federal Appeals Court, of being a friend of criminals.