You're Not Welcome Here, Ep. 8:“They’re Acting Against Their Interests”
This episode explores the concern that people act against their own social or political interests because of their identity. Because they privilege their identity, they oppose political, social, or economic policies that would be beneficial to them. Dan argues that this is a mistaken conception, and that we have to recognize that identity and interests are entangled with each other in complex ways. Changing how we understand the relationship between identity and interests is the key to advancing transformative politics.
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Produced by Brad Onishi and Dan Miller
Edited by Shannon Sassone
Music by Matt Puckett
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And this is the podcast series, You Don't Belong Here, where we look at identity, identity politics, related issues.
Straight White American Jesus is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and so we thank them, and I want to thank all of you for joining me for this time together.
And I want to open with this question, and I want you to just think about this.
It's a question you might have asked yourself.
It's a question that I guarantee that you've heard other people ask.
Why are they acting against their own interests?
The they, right?
Whoever they are, it can change.
But what we're talking about is the times we've asked ourselves, we've heard somebody else ask this question in the aftermath of an election.
Why did this group vote against this policy or this candidate who, it seems obvious to us, it was in their interest to vote for?
Or maybe it's something local.
It's a school board issue.
Or it's a policy discussion at work, and the people who would benefit from whatever the policy is, whatever the candidate's running on, whatever it is, vote against it, and we just don't get it, right?
Why do millions of people who would benefit from a public healthcare system oppose public healthcare?
Why do millions who decry government intrusion into private lives oppose marriage equality and want the government to make an imposition about private lives?
Why do millions who've been crushed by decades of neoliberal economic policies continue to support a political party built on the foundation of those parties?
Those are the kinds of things we're talking about.
Why are they acting against their own interests?
That's the question that I want us to think about in this episode.
And by way of introduction to that, I want to thank everybody for the feedback and the interest in the last episode when we talked about the relationship between class and identity.
That really stirred up a lot of conversation and it really follows from this.
And so what I want to do is I want to look at two key ideas today and this notion of why people act against their interests.
I want to look at two key ideas, identity and interest, because I think if we want to answer that question, we want to understand why it is that people act against or vote against things that seem that would benefit them.
Whether it's candidates, whether it's policies, whatever it is, we have to understand the relationship between identity and interest.
And this issue gets to the heart of why many, and I think this is probably especially true on the left, one of the reasons why many people oppose identity politics, and it's because they say that people act against their interests in favor of identity, right?
that when people adopt a policy or follow a candidate or whatever it is, because that candidate or policy appeals to their identity, this is done at the cost of their interests.
Or sometimes somebody will say their objective interests, that which is objectively going to benefit them.
And interests here can have an economic flavor as it does with, say, tax policy, right?
Why do people who would benefit from a certain kind of tax policy vote against it because somebody appeals to them on the basis of gender identity or sexuality or religious identity or racial identity.
But it also applies to other things, as I say, things like, say, healthcare or any number of...
It could be a work proposal in your workplace.
It could be a policy in your school district, as I say.
And this question makes a lot of intuitive sense, right?
The politicians and others act out of their interests, right?
We know that.
We know the politicians and anybody who wants to, you know, advance some sort of policy proposal or whatever it is, whether it's your boss at work, whether it's a family member, whether it's the President of the United States, we know that they act out of their interests and we know that they try to sway people to their way of thinking.
We know that there are people who manipulate others to get them to act as they want to.
And so this makes a lot of sense to us, right?
That when people appeal to identity, they are manipulating us.
They are manipulating others.
They are leading them away from their own interests.
They're getting them to adopt policies or positions that are not in their interest to get what they want.
And they lead people astray.
They're essentially exploiting people on the basis of identity.
And we know that people there are people who try to do this.
So it makes a lot of intuitive sense.
We say they're acting against their interests and it drives us crazy.
And so I think there is a lot of intuitive sense to this fear that appealing to identity means that people are led away from doing what is in their own interest or to, as it were, sort of scapegoating identity.
The reason why people act against their identity is because of identity politics, or maybe it's not the only reason, but it's a major reason.
So, there can be a lot of intuitive appeal to this view and this criticism of identity and identity politics.
But I think that the notion of people acting against their interests actually misses the real dynamics here.
I don't think that that's a very useful way of looking at what is going on in social and political contexts that we find so frustrating or we think this is occurring.
And that's what I want to talk about is because I think the issue is not so much, do people act against their interests?
I want to take a further step back and say, I think that question is wrong to start with.
I think as soon as we start the question of why do people act against their interests, we're setting ourselves up to miss the dynamics that are really at work in relation to identity and interests and politics.
And we need to think about this differently.
So to understand this, let's start about thinking how we tend to talk about interests.
We often think of interests, as I've already said, as something objective, right?
And identity as something subjective.
So we think of people acting against their objective interests because they give into their subjective identity.
But what do we mean by an interest here?
Right?
And I've already used this language.
I've done this intentionally.
I think we mean something like a benefit.
When we speak of an interest, we mean that it would be beneficial to someone to support some economic or social policy.
It would be beneficial for those who can't afford health insurance to support universal health care.
Progressive tax rate would be beneficial to those who aren't wealthy relative to a flat tax.
Supporting marriage equality would benefit those who don't identify as straight and on and on.
So that's how I think we think about interest.
We think of it as a kind of benefit.
Now, it is certainly the case that particular or social political policies would more or less objectively benefit particular groups.
That's absolutely true.
It's absolutely true that on a kind of an objective analysis, you can find Policies or proposals or programs that would benefit particular groups.
You can even find social economic policies that would objectively benefit a majority of the population, right?
The vast majority of people would benefit from this.
An example of this sort of local to me, regional to me, is the so-called millionaire's tax proposed in the state of Massachusetts, right?
And there are those who oppose this and say that placing an extra tax burden on high-income earners will have all kinds of negative effects and so forth.
But analyses of it, economic analyses have found that even with some wealthy people leaving the state to avoid the tax and so forth, it's going to generate massive amounts of revenue.
for the state.
It's going to benefit the vast majority of people and disadvantage very few.
Of course, we can make the argument that if we have a sense of the common good, then even those who are that wealthy are not being asked to make a very significant sacrifice for the betterment of the common good.
We get the idea, right, that there are things that would objectively benefit the greatest number of people.
So why do people routinely reject social and political policies that would be to their benefit?
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