Populists who support Trump like to point the finger at government bureaucracy, while denying how much they personally benefit from government actions (in a very similar manner to their position on climate change denial).
Title: "Why so many people who need the government hate it"
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/17/17675100/welfare-politics-republicans-democrats-suzanne-mettlerExtract: "“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
President Ronald Reagan uttered those words in his 1981 inaugural address to the country. He was referring specifically to the government’s role in helping bring the US out of an economic crisis. But since then, it’s become a kind of blanket truism in Republican circles. The government is a perennial boogeyman, and the main policy objective on the right has been to reduce the role of government in public life.
But there’s a problem: Many who accept this dogma are the very people who need the government the most. Research shows, for instance, that Republican states are disproportionately dependent on federal aid. Yet many Republican voters appear blissfully unaware of this contradiction.
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It turns out that people’s attitudes toward welfare are a strong predictor of how they’ll vote. But even more interesting, the types of federal benefits people get — and whether they’re “visible” like food stamps and Medicaid or “invisible” like tax breaks — influence how they perceive their own personal dependency on social welfare programs.
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We’re in this weird situation in which people have to come to rely on government more and more, and at the same time government has required less and less of people. Now, you’d expect this to mean that people’s attitudes toward government have become favorable, but the opposite is true. And this is the paradox I’m grappling with in the book.
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About 44 percent of Americans have unfavorable views of welfare. And the people who have very unfavorable views about welfare have strong attitudes about government that are shaped by this view. They believe that welfare is unfair, or that undeserving people are receiving it, and that deserving people like themselves are not getting anything.
There’s a lot of resentment out there from people who have this deeply negative perception of welfare, and this perception determines their view of government more than anything else. They’re blind to their own relationship to government, and so they assume welfare is something “other” people get.
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Race is significant, and many other scholars have discovered this as well. Across the board, whites had more unfavorable views of welfare than people of color, in large part because they considered welfare something that people of color primarily benefit from.
I also found that income matters a lot, too. Every group throughout the middle class had very unfavorable views toward welfare. Even African Americans, if they were middle-class, were more resentful of welfare than African Americans who were low-income or high-income.
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… data shows that it’s the so-called “red states” that contribute the least to the federal coffers and rely the most on federal services …
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I think there are a couple of things that might explain this. One is that I found that people who benefit from more visible social programs, like food stamps, are much less likely to vote.
This is not a big surprise. We’ve know for some time that people who are higher-income and have more socioeconomic status tend to vote more. They tend to be mobilized more by groups and public officials and they participate more, and they tend to be less cognizant of the ways in which they benefit from social services.
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The people who participate the most in politics, usually people with more education and more resources, rely on plenty of social benefits from government, but these benefits are often hidden in the tax code or are disguised in other ways. So they don’t think of government as having done much for them personally."