Edwin Lyngar
I hated government -- even as it was the only thing trying to
save me. Here's how, one day, I finally saw the light
I was a
20-year-old college dropout with no more than $100 in the bank the day my son
was born in 1994. I’d been in the Coast Guard just over six months.
Joining the service was my solution to a lot of problems, not the least of
which was being married to a pregnant, 19-year-old fellow dropout. We
were poor, and my overwhelming response to poverty was a profound shame that
drove me into the arms of the people least willing to help — conservatives.
Just before
our first baby arrived, my wife and I walked into the social services office
near the base where I was stationed in rural North Carolina. “You qualify for WIC and food stamps,” the middle-aged woman said. I don’t know whether
she disapproved of us or if all social services workers in the South oozed an
understated unpleasantness. We took the Women, Infants, Children vouchers
for free peanut butter, cheese and baby formula and got into the food stamp
line.
Looking
around, I saw no other young servicemen. Coming from the white working
class, I’d always been taught that food stamps were for the “others” —
failures, drug addicts or immigrants, maybe — not for real Americans
like me. I could not bear the stigma, so we walked out before our number
was called.
Even though
we didn’t take the food stamps, we lived in the warm embrace of the federal
government with subsidized housing and utilities, courtesy of Uncle Sam.
Yet I blamed all of my considerable problems on the government, the only
institution that was actively working to alleviate my suffering. I railed
against government spending (i.e., raising my own salary). At the same
time, the earned income tax credit was the only way I could balance my budget
at the end of the year.
I felt my
own poverty was a moral failure. To support my feelings of inadequacy,
every move I made only pushed me deeper into poverty. I bought a car and
got screwed on the financing. The credit I could get, I overused and was
overpriced to start with. My wife couldn’t get or keep a job, and we
could not afford reliable day care in any case. I was naive, broke and
uneducated but still felt entitled to a middle-class existence.
If you had
taken WIC and the EITC away from me, my son would still have eaten, but my life
would have been much more miserable. Without government help, I would
have had to borrow money from my family more often. I borrowed money from
my parents less than a handful of times, but I remember every single instance
with a burning shame. To ask for money was to admit defeat, to be a de facto
loser.
To make up
for my own failures, I voted to give rich people tax cuts, because somewhere
deep inside, I knew they were better than me. They
earned it. My support for conservative politics was atonement for the
original sin of being white trash.
In my second
tour of duty, I grew in rank and my circumstances improved. I voted for
George W. Bush. I sent his campaign money, even though I had little to
spare. During the Bush v. Gore recount, I grabbed a sign and walked the streets
of San Francisco to protest, carrying my toddler on my shoulders. I got
emotional, thinking of “freedom.”
Sometime
after he took office, I watched Bush speak at an event. He talked of tax
cuts. “It’s the people’s money,” he said. By then I was making even
better money, but I didn’t care about tax cuts for myself. I was still
paying little if any income tax, but I believed in “fairness.” The “death tax”
(aka the estate tax) was unfair and rich people paid more
taxes so they should get more of a tax break. I ignored my own personal
struggles when I made political decisions.
By the
financial meltdown of 2008, I was out of the military and living in Reno,
Nevada — a state hard hit by the downturn. I voted libertarian that
election year, even though the utter failure of the free market was
obvious. The financial crisis proved that rich people are no better than
me, and in fact, are often inferior to average people. They crash
companies, loot pensions and destroy banks, and when they hit a snag, they
scream to be rescued by government largess. By contrast, I continued to
pay my oversize mortgage for years, even as my home lost more than half its
value. I viewed my bad investment as yet another moral failure.
When it comes to voting and investing, rich people make calculated decisions,
while regular people make “emotional” and “moral” ones. Despite growing
self-awareness, I pushed away reality for another election cycle.
In 2010, I
couldn’t support my own Tea Party candidate for Senate because Sharron Angle
was an obvious lunatic. I instead sent money to the Rand Paul
campaign. Immediately the Tea Party-led Congress pushed drastic cuts in
government spending that prolonged the economic pain. The jobs crisis in
my own city was exacerbated by the needless gutting of government
employment. The people who crashed the economy — bankers and business
people — screamed about government spending and exploited Tea Party outrage to
get their own taxes lowered. Just months after the Tea Party victory, I
realized my mistake, but I could only watch as the people I supported inflicted
massive, unnecessary pain on the economy through government shutdowns, spending
cuts and gleeful cruelty.
I finally
“got it.” In 2012, I shunned my self-destructive voting habits and
supported Obama. I only wished there were a major party more liberal than the
Democrats for whom I could vote. Even as I saw the folly of my own
lifelong voting record, many of my friends and family moved further into the
Tea Party embrace, even as conservative policies made their lives worse.
I have a
close friend on permanent disability. He votes reliably for the most
extreme conservative in every election. Although he’s a Nevadan, he lives
just across the border in California, because that progressive state provides
better social safety nets for its disabled. He always votes for the person most
likely to slash the program he depends on daily for his own
survival. It’s like clinging to the end of a thin rope and voting for the
rope-cutting razor party.
The people
who most support the Republicans and the Tea Party carry a secret burden.
Many know that they are one medical emergency or broken down car away from
ruin, and they blame the government. They vote against their own
interests, often hurting themselves in concrete ways, in a vain attempt to deal
with their own, misguided shame about being poor. They believe “freedom”
is the answer, even though they live a form of wage indenture in a rigged
system.
I didn’t
become a liberal until I was nearly 40. By the time I came around, I was an
educated professional, married to another professional. We’re “making
it,” whatever that means these days. I gladly pay taxes now, but this
attitude is also rooted in self-interest. I have relatives who are poor,
and without government services, I might have to support them. We can all
go back to living in clans, like cavemen, or we can build institutions and
programs that help people who need it. It seems like a great bargain to
me.
I’m angry at
my younger self, not for being poor, but for supporting politicians who would
have kept me poor if they were able. Despite my personal attempts to
destroy the safety net, those benefits helped me. I earned a bachelor’s
degree for free courtesy of a federal program, and after my military service I
used the GI Bill to get two graduate degrees, all while making ends meet with
the earned income tax credit. The GI Bill not only helped me, it also
created much of the American middle class after World War II.
Conservatives often crow about “supporting the military,” but imagine how much
better America would be if the government used just 10 percent of the military
budget to pay for universal higher education, rather than saddling 20-year-olds
with mortgage-like debt.
Government
often fails because the moneyed interests don’t want it to succeed. They
hate government and most especially activist government (aka
government that does something useful). Their hatred for government is
really disdain for Americans, except as consumers or underpaid
labor.
Sadly, it
took me years — decades — to see the illogic of supporting people who disdain
me. But I’m a super-slow learner. I wish I could take the poorest,
struggling conservatives and shake them. I would scream that their
circumstances or failures or joblessness are not all their fault. They
should wise up and vote themselves a break. Rich people vote their
self-interest in every single election. Why don’t poor people?
Why Do Many "Poor And Uneducated" Vote Republican
or Democrat?
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Why Do Many "Poor And Uneducated" Vote Republican
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