The desire to hold on to this elation became a matter of emotional self-interest. Many liberal analysts—myself included—have tended to focus on economic interest. It is a focus on this that had led me, following Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, to carry the Great Paradox like a suitcase on my journey through Louisiana. Why, I’d repeatedly asked, with so many problems, was there so much disdain for federal money to alleviate them? These were questions that spoke heavily to economic self-interest. And while economic self-interest is never entirely absent, what I discovered was the
...more
