Why Do People Vote Against Their Own Self-Interests?

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote “We can have a democratic society or we can concentrate great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”
Have a large number of Americans simply given up on democracy? Is modern life too complex and changing too fast for ordinary American to understand and make informed choices? Are they misinformed, uninformed or misled? Are there social, religious and cultural reasons that outweigh economic considerations?
This book seeks to show that what matters most to a large plurality of middle and lower class Americans are values and virtues. Ultimately, this book will conclude that this is not an aberration, a denial of enlightened self-interest, but a basic reality of the human condition.
People rely on intuition, emotion, and use reason to justify their beliefs, behavior and decisions.