On New Year's Day, the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman issued a series of tweets in which he proclaimed as follows:
"The central fact of US political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites."
and then, a few minutes later:
"And by voting against its own interests, the white working class isn't just making itself poorer, it's literally killing itself."
Was I psyched to see this! With some slight variations, Krugman was essentially re-stating the thesis of my 2004 book, What's the Matter With Kansas?, in which I declared on the very first page that working people “getting their fundamental interests wrong” by voting for conservatives was “the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation on which all else rests”.
