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A democracy will die if it doesn’t educate its people! [1]

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Date: 2024-03-07  

In a well-educated country, support for someone like Trump would be confined to the lunatic fringe.

For over 200 years, Americans were brought up to believe their democracy was safe, thanks to tradition combined with the safeguards written into the Constitution. Trump and the GOP are challenging that supposition.

On paper, the concept of democracy sounds great, but in reality it contains its own inherent ‘poison pill’. Its strength - EVERYONE has a vote - is also its weakness. ‘Everyone having a vote’ works only as long as every voter is casting that vote based on knowledge - and knowledge is lacking where education is lacking. If someone can persuade a majority of poorly educated voters to base their votes on some kind of racist or religious ‘agenda’, this misguided majority might willingly vote their own right to participate out of existence. I don’t have to list all the examples where this has happened - Germany, Turkey, etc. - because history is littered with them.

The reason this phenomena is now endangering America is relatively evident. For a long time, the core of the GOP has been the extremely wealthy combined with the moderately wealthy in white suburbs. They have always faced the problem that there aren’t enough of them to win elections based on their self-serving agenda of retaining power and increasing their wealth. After all, how many voters can be persuaded that it’s in their interest to help the wealthy and their corporations abuse their workers, manipulate stocks, and pollute the environment without anyone interfering? The masses would be expected to work without complaining and pay all the nation’s taxes, a financial burden corporations feel they themselves have to avoid because it eats into their profits.

The fact that America is a democracy and has a Constitution complicates matters for the GOP core. Their power and wealth can manipulate much of the media, but not all, and without some kind of additional help they don’t have the number of votes they need to gain absolute control. As a result, they have to go looking for allies who will help them at the polls, but are too dumb to grasp the ‘real’ agenda.

Their conclusion: They can only win elections by stirring up the most god-awful people in America, the intellect-free cesspool of racists, gun nuts, and religious freaks.

But as Dr. Frankenstein found out, you can’t always control the monster you create. Republicans had spent years doing the groundwork, but forgot how powerful the ‘celebrity-awe’ phenomenon is. A reality-show host combined his own popularity with the existing pot of poisonous feelings long amassed by rightwing ‘talk’ radio and Fox News and now engulfing social media bubbles, and turned the whole pile of propaganda into his own private cult.

It’s too late to educate current generations, but if we narrowly survive this crisis, the nation as a whole had better get together behind a strong education system for the future.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/7/2227978/-A-democracy-will-die-if-it-doesn-t-educate-its-people?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=community_spotlight&pm_medium=web

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