In a recent Gallup poll, 56 percent of Americans indicated that the most important issues are extending the Bush-era tax cuts and lowering the estate tax. This is perplexing, considering that the average American income is less than $60,000 and these two issues have greater effect on people in a much higher tax bracket. Why these two issues? The Bush tax cuts are essentially regurgitated Reaganomics intended to make the rich richer, and the estate tax has been a long-standing tax war for the wealthy. But these are the two issues that Americans are concerned about.

Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas? explored the phenomenon of Americans voting against their own interests. He wrote about how Kansas was once a hotbed for radical political activity and haven for unpopular issues. That’s obviously no longer the case. Small Kansas towns are now much like other Midwestern and Southern communities. Religion and politics are intertwined, people base their votes on a few issues and much of the time those issues have very little to do with their own lives. I previously wrote about receiving mailers from Diane Black’s campaign touting her stance on abortion and gun control, two issues that aren’t really issues. She can do very little about abortion and standing up for gun rights has little to do with anything. Last time I checked we still had the Second Amendment and there’s no threat of that being overturned.

That’s not to say that there aren’t real concerns. At this point, most Americans should be skeptical about the bank bailouts and corporate influence on congress. There are very real concerns about government interference in our lives. Where this gets muddled is in the hypocrisy—the idea of what’s good for me is not good for you. Matt Taibbi summed up everything that’s wrong with the middleclass Republican voter in his October Rolling Stone article about the Tea Party. He wrote about the extraordinary numbers of people at the Tea Party rallies rolling around in motorized wheelchair-scooters, compliments of Medicare. These are the same people railing on about healthcare reform and government influence. Apparently, the government hand-out is bad unless it involves Medicare and Social Security checks. And the government needs to stay out of people’s business and pockets, unless of course it means keeping drugs, prostitution, gambling and gay marriage illegal. In other words, if the government is giving it to them, it’s good, but if government action is disagreeable to them, it needs to be regulated.

You’ve got to hand it to the Republican Party for grabbing up power by the fistful without even trying. They’ve never been blind to an opportunity for personal gain and the Tea Party rallies offer everything and more for political possibilities. You have droves of mostly older white voters who fancy themselves as part of some modern rebellion and are undereducated and generically angry. The truth is that these people along with most other Americans are conformists searching for an identity. If this were 1773, they wouldn’t be the ones instigating a “tea party.” These people would support the British because the British would give them a tax break and Dancing with the Stars, and convince them that George Washington wants to take away their freedom.