Why on Earth would anyone not rich vote Republican?
If you’re in the luckiest one percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.
-- Warren Buffett
Interesting that you'd mention that. It is almost precisely the question my father (a Republican from the Eisenhower years on) pondered repeatedly from the wake of the Reagan restoration of the GOP to his passing a few years ago. As he put it, "What kind of idiot must one be to be of modest means and subordinate one's financial well being and prospects for tax code equanimity to whether someone else does or doesn't give birth or whether a bunch of [gays have can sex]? It's just ridiculous. Those are the kinds of things with which one concerns oneself
after security one's financial independence, not
before."
Dad was keenly aware of his duty to his countrymen; thus as go priorities, he embraced the notion that before there can be
noblesse oblige there must be, with regard to one's finances,
vitesse oblige. Dad saw life as a set of priorities, and the first priority for him (Dad was a member of "The Greatest Generation") was providing for his family, achieving a financial position whereby the only way he and we were going to be in real financial peril was either he or someone in his household was incredibly imprudent (fiscally or otherwise) or the nation was experiencing an economic depression on the order of the Great Depression, or both.
Dad was, IMO, a very prescient fellow for he was quick to note a host of realities that yet perplex many. For instance, Dad's deep Southern roots didn't bestow in him much regard for minorities on the whole, yet his economic sensibilities informed him that regardless of his social views about non-whites that he and the nation were still better off with policies that hastened blacks', as a segment of the citizenry, obtaining financial parity with whites. He went to his grave pitying blacks, for in his mind blacks had, for all but the last decade of the 20th century, faced among the most damnable of poor choices:
- GOP prior to Reagan -- social regard and economic disregard (though not on account of their being black, but because they were poor), or
- Democrats prior to Clinton -- cling to a brief blast of social reform, followed by nearly half a century of abnegation thereof by way of insouciance
- GOP after Reagan -- progressive resurrection of pre-Civil Rights era mentality toward their plight compounded with policies that disfavored the poor, regardless of race.
- Democrats after Clinton -- despite the increased enlightenment they were ineffectual at implementing policies that aligned with those ideas.
I think Dad never arrived at a conclusion about which major party's leaders and ideologies least disserved blacks. Be that as it may, he existed not in a state of denial about the ills of either. His acknowledgement of that, despite his only ever arriving at a mental state of indifference about racial minorities, is something that, IMO, even today far too many conservatives and liberals deny.
If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat.
-- Ron Suskind, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President