"Why do people often vote against their own interests?"

It's hard to imagine the BBC publishing an article as utterly patronising and unthinkingly biased as this one about any country but the United States.

If there is one area where the BBC really could do the British public a service, it would be by helping them understand Americans.  Most Britons are interested in what is going on over the pond and, thanks to the enormous raw economic power of the United States, they have an interest in understanding how its leaders and ordinary citizens think.

Instead, they try and feed us this kind of rubbish.  Describing opposition to the new healthcare bill as being driven by "the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step on the road to a police state".  Or describing the town hall meetings - which were often heated but were thoroughly democratic - as "an explosion of rage and barely suppressed violence".  Biased BBC have noted just how pernicious that term "barely suppressed" is, it allows someone to be cast as dangerous without them actually having done anything.

At no point does the article even consider the possibility that there might be an admissible, intellectually respectable case that the healthcare reform on offer wasn't in the interests of ordinary Americans.  But there definitely is such a case.  To put it simply, most Americans are less concerned about coverage than they are about cost.  There are good reasons for that: many uninsured people are the young healthy who could afford insurance but choose not to buy it in order to save money (partly because they aren't allowed to buy cheap alternatives, the proposed healthcare reform would make that problem worse), that isn't an unreasonable choice to make.  By contrast, the US healthcare system is very expensive compared to that in other countries.  But the new bill is projected to make it more expensive and doesn't deal with problems like the litigation culture which push up costs, all those absurd lawsuits that you hear about. 

For the 84 per cent of Americans with healthcare, the proposed reform will push up their bills significantly for no benefit, as healthcare companies will be forced to charge them the same as those with expensive conditions.  There are simpler ways of helping the uninsured and voters are upset at the idea they're being pushed into having to buy one-size-fits-all insurance.

At the same time, the bill is an ugly product of some fairly naked vested interests.  Mort Zuckerman - a Democrat pundit - has attacked it stridently on those grounds:

"Five states got deals on health care—one of them was Harry Reid’s [the majority leader in the Senate]. It is disgusting, just disgusting. I’ve never seen anything like it. The unions just got them to drop the tax on Cadillac plans in the health-care bill. It was pure union politics. They just went along with it. It’s a bizarre form of political corruption. It’s bribery. I suppose they could say, that’s the system. He was supposed to change it or try to change it."

All these arguments have been absolutely central to the debate in the United States.  Religion hasn't come into the debate at all, except to the extent that it forced an amendment on abortion to prevent state funding for that procedure.  And the cries of "socialism" are simply a proxy for Americans' quite reasonable dislike of the growing power of government and politics in the economy.

In the end, while some Republicans might have a lowbrow style, the BBC article gives an example from George W. Bush - and plenty of people on the left and right in every country do that - the American Right does a huge amount of serious policy analysis.  Their think tanks, for example, host serious policy expertise on a far greater scale and working at a far greater depth than any similar British organisation on the left or the right.  Take a look at a Republican Congressman's website and you're almost certain to find it talks about jobs and taxes, not bibles and conspiracy theories.

There certainly are lunatics and idiots among US Republicans, but anyone who has spent any time in politics will know that the crazies are a sadly unavoidable part of it and know no ideological, partisan or national bounds.  You don't have to agree with the Republicans, but you should at least try to understand why they believe what they do.

I've lost count of the number of times I've had the same conversation with people in Britain who, relying on the BBC to give them a reasonable understanding of what is going on over there, share its assumptions about and parrot this kind of nonsense.  Trying to convince them that conservatives there are serious people they should engage with rather than dismiss.

Regardless of how "special" it is, our relationship with the United States is incredibly important.  Every country from China to Canada needs to work to effectively engage with the superpower and we should have a great advantage as cultural and historical ties give us a head start over most in establishing an effective dialogue.  But we won't be able to get anywhere if the BBC feeds us this kind of nonsense and gives people the impression that Americans are poor saps for evil corporate Republicans who convince them to distrust anyone who can count to ten.

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