The popular myth has always been promulgated by Republicans saying that Democratic politicians engage in class-warfare against the middle-class, on behalf of the poor; but that's just a blatant lie, whose purpose is to hide the very real class-war, by Republicans, against the middle class, which is being waged successfully on behalf of the rich -- the exact opposite of what Republicans claim.
Furthermore, "Senators seem to have been a good deal more responsive to upper-income constituents when a Republican was in the White House ... than they were with a Democrat in the White House." Perhaps this is the reason, then, why even with a conservative Democratic President such as Obama, today's far-rightwing Republican Party cannot get much of its wish-list filled. Moreover, Bartels found "surprisingly strong and consistent evidence that the biases I have identified in senators' responsiveness to rich and poor constituents are not due to differences between rich and poor constituents in [electoral] turnout, political knowledge, or contacting." In common parlance: Bartels found that ideology alone accounts for this difference.
He also considered the possibility posed by a 1995 study, which had shown that, "citizens in the top quarter of the income distribution ... provided almost three quarters of the total campaign contributions." Could that be the answer -- Senators were simply voting for their contributors? Bartels found that only "two of the eight salient roll call votes [concerning the minimum wage, and abortion]" in his study could reasonably be explained on the basis mainly of campaign contributions; the other six could not.
A pronounced ideological component seems to have been involved in most Senate votes. Republican Senators voted overwhelmingly in favor of the rich, and Democratic Senators voted equally often in favor of the rich and of the middle-class, and only in about one-quarter of the instances could political donations reasonably account for that.
It might also be worth noting that, even today, the purely racist tendency of the aristocracy is so great that it often is even strong enough to outweigh their greed -- discrimination is practiced even when it's unprofitable . So: the traditional leftist "explanation" for conservatism (that it's purely based on greed) is false. The understanding that leftists have of rightists is basically the mirror-image of the way Fox "News" characterizes leftists.
This present news report might sound instead somewhat like an op-ed, because the subject here is ideology. However, the scientific studies that are being reported here constitute solid scientific findings, not opinions, and reporting them might come as interesting news to many readers, because our news-media unfortunately tend to be reluctant to report as news even the best scientific findings about ideology. But there is a difference between reporting on ideology, versus applying ideology (which an op-ed is supposed to do). This is therefore a news story, which brings together many studies that concern people's ideology. If it happens to surprise anyone, then that would be simply because the major mainstream "news"media's "neutrality" and "nonpartisanship" have required that they avoid reporting such facts as have been reported here. A lot of important facts are unreported for that reason. However, their being unreported has nothing to do with there being anything dubious about them.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .
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