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Working class people tend to be less-educated, live in more rural areas, be a part of less-diverse communities, and be prone to accept authority figures. And the GOP has spent a half-century trying to convince that exact group that every problem they're experiencing is actually the opposite. So they vote against their best interests in election after election, and then the people they voted for successfully convince them that the Democrats actually torpedoed it all and they could've actually made everything better if they just had one more term...rinse and repeat across 25+ election cycles.
I think the working class is much broader than that, and part of our problem is this perception.
It's definitely getting broader than that, with the way that wealth stratification continues to skyrocket. But I don't mean "actually rural," I really do mean "more rural." A good amount of city real estate prices have priced lower-income folks out of the urban core in many (most?) cities, gentrifying the downtown and resulting in a reversal of 1980s White Flight as the working class move to now-cheaper suburban and rural communities.
I didn't mean just farmers or whatever. I just mean people who haven't got the money to live in the Trader Joe's district.
People that make enough to "live in the trader Joe's district" but have to keep working at their job to keep living in their apartment have way more in common with people that make less than them than they do the people that don't have to work at all.
We know that, but decades of Republican propaganda has got the small business owners, who get absolutely wrecked by Republican policies, thinking they're on the side of the rich against the employee class.
A large portion of the working class....
I think we overemphasize education and should talk more about people's ability to act and think independently.
That is the goal of education.
Historically, the goal of education was to have a productive labor force. And even if our education system was to teach independence, it cannot deliver the ability, that comes from economic and social liberation.
Education means people can't think independently is a real dumb argument.
I think we overemphasize water and should talk more about people's hydration.
Sounds like something the CEO of Nestle would say.
Education doesn't make people act independently, often to the contrary.
Right-wing propaganda nonsense. Education teaches you how to evaluate sources and interrogate assumptions.
My "source" on education being a tool of Hegemony is Micheal Foucault, not exactly a right-wing propagandist. The right has a tendency to take arguments from others and twist them to accomplish the opposite.
My apologies, I thought you were making the opposite argument. But I still disagree.
All other things being equal, educated people are statistically less susceptible to disinformation and fallacious arguments. If they weren't, the fascists wouldn't be trying to eliminate public education, and the electoral map wouldn't correlate so strongly with education.
Foucault wasn't wrong about right-wingers using educational systems for indoctrination, but that's not the current GOP playbook. Their strategy relies on people being too anxious and uneducated to separate fact from fiction, and to provide the propaganda another way (specifically, via carpet-bombing media, social and otherwise, with disinformation). Why bother wasting time at the school district level when there are nationwide platforms where people line up voluntarily to get their ration of AI-generated, foreign-actor-crafted lies delivered straight into to their eyeballs?
Yeah, we've gotta fix the education system. And yeah, we've gotta get people to recognize where they're being controlled. But I don't think that eliminating the former is going to accomplish the latter; and clearly the other side knows it, too.
Wasn't trying to argue we should abolish public education but that we can't rely on reforming education to fix our political system. It flows the other way. Which means we also need to find ways to cultivate independent thought outside of traditional education. This comes in many forms, mutual aide, potlucks, new art, community workshops, etc but the through line is you are offering people more independence to be well.