Keeping " the gov't out of our medicare" since the late 1800s

In Chapter 3, Condon's narrator in The Manchurian Candidate points out that, "the conception of people acting against their own best interests should not startle us. We see it occasionally in sleepwalk and in politics."

It reminded me of a bit in David Cross's "Bigger and Blackerer" comedy special where he talks about what he calls the "health care yellings" of 08', saying:

Up until maybe five, six years ago, I would’ve been more outraged and like, ‘This is terrible. This is awful. These people are crazy. What’s going on here?’ But I realized now that I’m 45 and I’ve accrued enough experience … America has a proud rich tradition of voting against its own best interests, and why should it stop now? I watch it now with detached bemusement.

When Martha Collins visited our class, she talked a bit about The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (you can hear Alexander talk about it here on NPR). The idea of this baffling American political tradition reminded me of her brief recap of the Populist movement in the 1800s. In an interview with The Sun Magazine, Alexander describes how,

This movement challenged the corporate power of railroads and the plantation owners. It was one of the first major, meaningful political alliances between poor whites and blacks in the country, and it was having amazing success. The white ruling class was alarmed and proposed laws that would disenfranchise blacks. It waged campaigns that appealed to racial biases, resentments, and stereotypes of black people — essentially persuading poor whites not to align themselves with poor blacks, because whites were ―"better than that.

Essentially, the affluent class played on the poor whites' fears of being lumped into the bottom rung and in the end, they clung to what little sense of superiority the cultural atmosphere would allot them by voting for Jim Crow laws and big business, against their own economic interest.

I guess my question is do you think the less well-to-do portion of America is doomed to disenfranchisement, save for a few short-lived bursts of Populist or Occupy-esque momentum? What do you think it would take for a voting block based on the lower-middle class's best interest to band together?