Browsing CNN, I came across an interview with novelist John Grisham, which included the following quote:

“I think what the Republicans have done in past elections is brilliant. Because, they’ve convinced a lot of people to vote for them against their own economic self-interest, and they’ve done that by skillfully manipulating a handful of social issues, primarily abortion and gay rights and sometimes gun control,” he says. “And the Republicans have used those to scare a lot of people into voting for Republican candidates. It’s skillful manipulation.”

This is not a new argument – an entire book has been written on this exact premise – but seeing it raised by Grisham reminds me how silly it is. What Grisham (and Frank) are saying is that people should use their vote as a tool for self-enrichment, by voting for whichever party promises to give them the greatest largesse from the state treasury. The tendency towards narrow, self-interested voting was seen as one of the major flaws with democracy by political philosophers from Hegel to Aristotle, both of whom sought ways to limit it. Unchecked, it would create a “marketplace state” in which blocs of voters compete for state resources, and government expenditure consumes ever-greater percentages of the national GDP, eventually choking the economy. To some extent this has already happened, hence the huge and irreversible growth of the US government since the New Deal. I find it bizarre that people think the biggest problem with American democracy is that the voters aren’t self-interested enough.
—EDIT:

Just so no-one misunderstands me, this post should not be seen as an endorsement of the economic policies of the Republicans. If anything, Grisham and the like are making a huge mistake in assuming that the Republican Party is an economically libertarian party, as it claims to be, when in reality (at least during the George W. Bush era) it has been a big-government, quasi-socialist “compassionate conservative” party. If you really think that the poor benefit from more government spending, then maybe they are voting according to self-interest when they vote Republican. However, I’m less interested in the practical political implications of this argument than in the philosophy underlying it, which I think is fundamentally flawed.