the Left's sad devotion to economic determinism is leading them to destruction.
They're constantly saying that we, or their so-called "working class", are voting, mysteriously, "against their (our) interests".
How on earth would they know what our "interests" are? Man does not live by bread alone.
It is precisely because common people have recognized that electing Democrats works exactly against the things that they value most that we are in a period of GOP ascendency.
He wishes the cold war had never happened, or the left had won it. His economic thought is unreconstructed New Deal socialism, if not clear back to WJ Bryan. The economic reality is decisions on resource allocation can be made reasonably well by business (not due to brilliance, mostly just due to incentive) or can be botched by faceless bureaucrats with engineering degrees a thousand miles away. But he thinks everyone can get whatever they want by just voting it to themselves out of the hands of "the rich".
His cultural and political thought is reasonably awake and nuanced. His blind spot is economics. On that subject, he has convinced himself that capitalism is nothing but a con game, because he has seen a lot of ad copy and bubble boosterism. He ignores the real record of economic history, because to him everything is rhetoric and spin. If there are shallow salesmen whose rhetoric is poor, capitalism must be a joke. Not a sound syllogism, but his actual thought process on the matter.
It's not voting against your economic self interest when you vote for the party that prefers tax cuts to tax increases.
What this author refers to as "economic self-interest" means nothing more than send all your money to D.C. and let them dole it out to you as they see fit. IOW, line up at the federal teat.