this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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America is in this mess because the average voter doesn't have those two brain cells. You can't just go around expecting Americans to be literate!!
Tired of "average voter" bashing, when the root of our problems isn't with the working class to begin with.
They're just a bunch of hostages blaming one another for supporting the wrong plane hijacker. None of them have any material control over policy or infrastructure.
Literacy and critical thinking are being actively sabotaged by the conservatives. You can't pretend that isn't happening.
The fact that the average American reads at a children's level is terrible, but it's kinda not entirely their fault. I'm not really trying to bash them.
There are people who are politically educated, who have good values and knowledge of the world and the ability to think critically. But they have one flaw. And it is these people I intend to bash for their incompetence.
That one flaw is, that they think everyone else is as smart as them. They don't understand that not everyone had the same opportunities as them. They don't know how to talk down to an audience. Trump knows how to talk down to an audience, and the uneducated people love him for it! But these educated people expect everyone to have the same political literacy as them. And they're alienating those masses.
When you expect someone to be smart, you can make them feel stupid. A lot of uneducated Republican voters hate us university-educated city folk, because we make them feel stupid. There's a rising tide of anti-intellectualism in society because we can't talk to the people who haven't been given intellectual privilege. We're alienating them.
And it's not exactly helping that I can go to a commie community and see "read Lenin or GTFO". That's not how we build class consciousness with the educationally underprivileged.
Most people get their political news from Instagram reels and chatbots quoting Reddit. They're depending on us educated people, who they would call "elites", to tell them what's happening. And it is the Trumps of the world who understand that, who make those Instagram reels. That is why we're losing.
That's what Modi did in India. It's what Murdoch did with the press. It's how fascists always grow their influence.
We gotta talk down to people.
That's certainly the liberal line. I've seen conservatives say the exact same thing about liberals.
"Critical Thinking" gets billed as an objective analysis, but inevitably mutates into "if you don't agree with me, you didn't think about the issue hard enough".
Ayn Rand's Objectivists and Sam Bankman-Fried's Longtermists have been beating the drum on "critical thinking" being deficit for their respective careers, and look where it got them.
That's not even remotely true.
And herein is the problem. You've landed on a scapegoat that helps justify your disgust for "average voters". But you're starting from a premise of other people being inferior. And you're working backwards into supporting claims that back up your gut instinct.
Democrats and republicans are politically illiterate
The average voter doesn't vote. Seems like the issue is the average campaigner that cannot figure out a way to make themselves more appealing than a rapist with a spraytan, which is impressive given that many non-voters yelled out some pretty easy demands for all to hear.
D'awwww, you think they voted themselves into this mess?
Dear God, where were you educated? Do share (this should be hilarious)