 Time
for another of life's imponderables. Both in Canada and the US, family
farmers and small business people have, in recent years, consistently
voted conservative, and show every intention of doing so again this
year. This makes absolutely no sense: Most farm states and provinces
are net recipients of government largesse (i.e. they receive in
equalization payments and services more than they pay for, subsidized
by the more urban and more liberal states and provinces). And even
though in the past 20 years conservative governments have spent more
than liberal governments, that money has largely gone to tax cuts for
the very rich and defense spending, creating huge deficits that small
farmers and small business people have to repay in taxes, and receive
almost no benefit from.
I talked to a few local farmers and small business people to try to find out why they vote conservative. This small sample may not be representative, but what they told me was:
- They perceive liberal governments to be based in, and
focused on, the big cities. Even in the suburbs this anti-urban feeling
is strong, and translates into an anti-liberal (rather than
pro-conservative) vote.
- They are very proud people, who like to think they are
independent and don't need government help. So a liberal saying he's
going to provide more assistance for small farmers and small
businesspeople might actually be insulting them rather than wooing
them. To those that have never lived through a depression (or learned
its lessons), government handouts "encourage laziness". Small business
still buys the 'free market' myth, whereas big business knows it's a myth and perpetrate it strictly as a power lever.
- They really have no idea how government works, where the
money goes, how they benefit from it, or how bigger corporations
benefit much more than they do due to various government subsidies. The
concept that tax cuts = service cuts, and that big corporations are at
least as inefficient as big government, is lost on these guys. They
don't understand that it's they who have to pay for that inefficiency, in inflated consumer prices and in taxes for big corporation handouts.
- Quite aside from economics, they are socially conservative, as Lakoff defines the term. Homosexuality frightens them, liberated women frighten them, immigrants frighten them, government
frightens them. They are terrified by crime (and, by extension,
'terrorism') and see it as a sign of moral decay, in black and white
terms. They know in their hearts that you can't turn back the clock,
but emotionally they want to, and that nostalgia and fear is a powerful
weapon that Republicans and Conservatives are using to their advantage.
Many people vote with their hearts, not with their heads, a lesson most
liberals still haven't learned.
Yesterday the US House of Representatives passed a Republican bill
that would give $140 billion in tax breaks to "businesspeople and
farmers". Who benefits? "Companies with foreign corporate profits,
timber companies, oil & gas drillers, movie studios, wine
distributors, manufacturers of bows and arrows, and tobacco farmers".
The rest of us, including small farmers and small businesspeople, will
foot the bill. But I'll bet that if small farmers and small
businesspeople are even aware of the bill, they won't be outraged and
might even be more inclined
to vote Republican because "it's pro-business". And the Democrats,
whose Southern flank supported the bill because of the tobacco subsidy,
are really in no position to shout foul. In a country with only two
parties both feeding at the same trough, the rich & powerful win
and everyone else loses.
In Canada, which has five parties to choose from, the 'first past the
post' electoral system undoes the benefits of party pluralism. With the
three small parties all socially liberal, Canadian liberals are forced
to 'vote strategically', which means voting for the Liberal Party
instead of their real choice, the NDP or the Green Party, to prevent
the 30% of Canadian conservatives, who have only one voting choice,
from stealing the election. We'll find out in ten days whether they did
so or not.
Alas, both the US Republican and the Canadian Conservative parties are
consistently and heavily propped up by small farmers and small
businesspeople. Without that support, these parties would be history.
It doesn't make any sense, but it's the reality that both right-wing
parties are counting on for election success this year. It's a
brilliant con.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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