Working Class-Not Stupid - Ravinder Nath MD Bhalla

Why do people vote against their own interests?

Wrong question. Nobody votes against their interests. They vote their interests as they have learned to see them-and someone spent $60 million teaching them to see wrong.

A psychiatrist who spent forty years listening to working people-in clinics, at kitchen tables, in the hours when the defenses come down-follows one Michigan Senate primary to answer the question the pundits keep fumbling. Not "what’s the matter with Kansas," but what’s the matter with the explanation: the working class is not stupid. It is betrayed, and it has receipts.

The book follows the money and the mind at once. How scarcity sells louder than abundance even when abundance pays back. How trust, once harvested, gets spent against the people who gave it. How both parties, across the whole history of the nation, have sidelined the child, the mother, and the working family-and called the sidelining necessity. And what a floor under every child would actually cost, which is less than what its absence already costs, every year, in the only ledger that matters.

This is not a book for one election. It is a book about the oldest transaction in politics-protection promised, protection sold-written for the people on the paying end of it.

For readers of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Strangers in Their Own Land, and The Righteous Mind.