Hello Unpopular Opinion / Politics, it’s your boi who you’ve never met or heard of before today. That’s fine, I’ve never heard of me either.
I’ve written this elsewhere in a far more extensive work in my attempt to deradicalize my parents, but I’m posting part of it here to give a different perspective on the American electorate. For those who don’t have much time, know that I will be bolding the important parts. If you read just those you should get the gist of the information without my narrativization. However, if you have time I would suggest reading it in its entirety as the surrounding context around each point will be important for the whole point I’m trying to make here.
(If the bolding annoys you, I will comment this essay without it as well).
To be fair, I’ve seen the stirrings of this sentiment already in the comments of many posts over the past week, so many of you are already on the same wavelength as me. You already suspect the truth, but just haven’t dug up the sources for it. I have included sources in this post that you can read and use as you see fit.
My hope is that those of you reading this can use this post as a tool and a resource for future arguments and to convince the other leftists in your life that MANY of the people who voted for the fascist this time around are just misguided and can be reached. Because that’s what we need to do if we’re going to salvage anything worth saving from this country and avoid the fate of Weimar.
First, let me say that I agree with many of you. The American people are stupid. They’re uneducated and disengaged from the political process of the country. They’re easily led around by their amygdala and subject to relentless propaganda that they choose to watch. They call us Sheep while they remain slavishly devoted to a man who despises them.
But it’s not their fault.
THE CONSERVATIVE CRUSADE AGAINST EDUCATION
It should be obvious to anyone who spends time on this site that the Republicans hate education, especially that at the collegiate level. Besides Trump explicitly stating that he wishes to fully destroy the Department of Education, it should be obvious in the stated goals and policy of the Republicans in general. What you may not know is that this has been the game plan for them for half a century.
1966 – Reagan, Freeman, and the Assault on Education
As with most things in the United States, the point at which everything went to shit for education was the election of Ronald Reagan.
At the time, before his election as governor of California, the country had just escaped a recession and was facing another one. Inflation was high, the Vietnam war was worsening and, most importantly, the country was in mourning and enduring the chaos following the assassination of JFK. The American people were poor, angry, confused, and had placed a great deal of their hope in the policy and the future that JFK would have built. LBJ, Kennedy’s Vice President, for all of his faults did do some things right in trying to enact JFK’s vision for the future, but the quality of life for the average American was on the decline and protests were common in every state as people began to search for solutions to their problems.
One of these protests, taking place on the UC Berkeley campus in California, garnered national media attention. Now I won’t get into the specifics of the protest but suffice to say the students, like (almost) always, were right. The tactics they would use in their protests would endure for generations and be used by the Civil Rights movement to enact countrywide change and revitalize the movements of progressives nationwide.
If interested about the protests – https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/protests-at-the-university-of-california-berkeley
And the Right fucking hated it. The Elites of the country, both political and in business, would use these widely popular but specifically unpopular protests to their advantage. They would organize the political elements of the Right and begin grooming many new politicians, Reagan included, to see their vision for America enacted.
See, some decades earlier the Rich and Mighty of the country had lost a significant amount of their wealth, power, and influence due to the combined effort of the labor union movements and Roosevelt’s New Deal. In a short span of time, the economic equivalent of the aristocracy had been forcibly separated from their basis of power. And, like the aristocracy of old, they were bitter about it.
Thus began the ascension of Ronald Reagan. Campaigning on the ‘restoration of order’ on college campuses and ‘clamping down on the spoiled young people’ of America, he led a Right-Populist effort to become governor of California. Most history books say he won by a landslide, but the truth is that the country was more class conscious at the time and a large portion of the population distrusted his rhetoric. But, nonetheless, enough of the state supported his bid, the effort largely buoyed by the poor and uneducated people of America, many of whom had lived through the Great Depression and quietly resented the easy prosperity that young people were taking advantage of.
https://newsarchive.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/06/08_reagan.shtml
Now Governor, Reagan would enact several policies that would be disastrous for the quality and availability of education in this country. First, he would slash funding for higher education almost entirely, creating the Student Loan industry as it exists today. He would also cut funding to basic education as well, prevent the construction of more college campuses and, eventually, deploy the national guard to quell the student protests once and for all.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ684842.pdf
I struggle to say with certainty that Reagan knew what he was doing here. I don’t know for sure if he was a Conservative ideologue at the time, knowing that destroying education would create a dumb, docile, underclass of Americans that the GOP would take advantage of for the rest of American history. It could have just been part of the fear surrounding the Cold War, and the overwhelming ferocity with which the United States would clamp down on any socialistic tendencies at the time. I don’t know for certain that he was premeditated in his early efforts to destroy the very foundation of the country but was instead operating out of ignorance and just base human hatred.
That being said, the people around him certainly were aware of what they were doing. They knew exactly what they wanted for the country and it didn’t matter a bit that it would be bad for 95% of the population. The direct quote, a few years later, from senior advisor Roger Freeman is ‘We are in danger of creating an educated Proletariat. That’s dynamite. We must be selective in who we allow to go through higher education.”
Freeman, among others in this newly-forming sphere of Conservative Political Power, would work to undermine the very right to education for all Americans. Hundreds of Conservative politicians across the country would follow suit and defund their own schooling programs. And, while I struggle to assign direct premeditated culpability to Reagan when he was governor, I do not do so with these people. Freeman knew exactly what he was doing, and his scions down the years have kept alive the dream of creating a nation of easily-frightened imbeciles that could be exploited for both monetary and political gain.
https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/
Of course, these changes were noticed by the progressive movements across the country. They understood what the Right was doing and began to organize against it. Student organizations, progressive political groups, and a myriad of worker cooperatives would begin to plan how to fight this tide by creating the social and political will needed to counter these efforts from the worst people in America at the time.
1971 – The Powell Memorandum
Thus entered Lewis Powell, the Powell Memorandum, and the formation of Right wing Think Tanks and Right wing faux-intellectualism. Powell, later to be nominated to the Supreme Court, would author a far-reaching strategy for the Conservative movement as a whole designed to undermine the power of the worker, further degrade the power of the student, and overwhelm the political process with Conservative theory.
Following Powell’s plans, various corporate-funded think tanks and organizations would infiltrate the student and worker movements of the country and destroy them from the inside. Progressive movements across the country would either be torn apart or be so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of money that the Rich and Mighty threw their way that they could not advocate for effective change.
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/05/09/launch-long-game
This guy. This fucking guy is the author of 90% of America’s issues today. His insistence that humanity MUST have hierarchy, haves and have-nots, rich and poor, intelligent and unintelligent, etc. became (admittedly it has always been this way) the core of the American Conservative movement. If you are looking for a singular mastermind to which we can ascribe the blame for the shitstorm that is this country, you’d be hard pressed to find a better candidate than Powell.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/powell-memo-project-2025-plutocracy
And Reagan, later to be elected as president, would follow this plan flawlessly. He would crack down on labor unions, on workers, on welfare, on governmental structures and aid programs, and, most important to this essay, on education. Reagan would enact many programs that would degrade the quality of public education, leading to the creation of private, for-profit colleges, undergrad schools, charter schools, etc. His coup against the intellectual sphere of this country was successful – he ensured, almost singlehandedly, that only the wealthy would have access to higher education.
Thus, it was a two-pronged attack. The poor of the country were now prevented from attending higher education without taking on ruinous debt. And, for those few who made it through scholarships or the sacrificing of financial stability of their family, they were systematically identified, targeted, and influenced to develop ideals counter to what they truly believed.
The ultimate ideal was that the adherents to this new artificial ideology (reference to the larger document that I was working on) would be the only ones allowed to receive enough education to understand the world. Everyone else, the vast majority of the American people, would instead labor in ignorance, unable to reasonably question their place in the world or do anything to change it. Essentially, those who do not ‘believe in the right things’ must never be allowed to challenge our authority. To paraphrase Orwell, ‘We must prevent the Proles from attaining any level of learning. Should they realize that it is they that hold the power, our ability to exploit them will collapse.’
WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
The purpose of this post is not to function as an argument that you, my hopefully leftist readers, can use in the future. I ask that you do not copy and paste this anywhere, do not send a link to this to your conservative family members saying ‘this is why you’re wrong’, and do not use it in any projects you may be working on. This isn’t for them. This is for you. This is fuel for your understanding of your fellow American citizens. And, hopefully, it will be fuel for some of you should you ever be in a position to change this country’s relationship with education.
The voters of the GOP are, by and large, victims. They’re victims of a deliberate, premeditated, and comprehensive plot to cynically destroy the middle class and the very fabric of this country for profit. They are victims of the New-Aristocracy, seeking to become like the Lords and Barons of old, only this time with the internet and robots. They are victims of a heinous and relentless program of propaganda designed to poke them in the fear center of their brains over and over and over again.
Yes, they may act out of this ignorance that has been forced upon them and do things that we consider to be malicious. I do not absolve them of their personal responsibility – those that follow the MAGA movement have made many choices to be there. But they are not your enemy. Not REALLY. They are simply people trapped in their own worlds where they have never been given the tools necessary to understand and escape.
(That being said, the active white supremacists, the Nazis, the politicians and pundits, etc. ARE our enemies. They are the enemy of everyone in this country, even if they’ve convinced a third of it that they are on their side. As the Punks say, any good leftist knows that you only punch Nazis. You do not converse, you do not argue, you only remove them. By force if necessary).
Part of the problems that we face as leftists is that we operate in a world of vastly more information than the average conservative. Our view of the world is more complete and that’s why we’re leftists. Education is directly correlated with left leaning politics, after all. The mind of the average American citizen will shut down when presented with large amounts of information. I hate that, you hate that, but it’s true.
Disinformation won this election for Trump. A media environment in which he could lie all day every day and be heard by millions of people won this election. We do not have an equivalent on the Left. We have no Fox News, we have no Joe Rogan, we have no Musk, no Carlson, etc. We need to remedy this situation, sooner rather than later. We need to match the Right in their outreach to people and give the people of this country an alternative to Right-Populism.
Do not attack your fellow citizens. Do not tell them that they are wrong and provide them with a list of sources that tells them why. Even though you are right, they will shut down at the first sign of hostility. Understand that they are victims, as much as you. They need to be talked to and met where they are, at first engaging about life in general and then finally talking about politics and what we want this country to be. This is the only chance that we have to escape this New Weimar we have found ourselves in.
Join your local mutual aid organizations. Join your local Democratic party or any left leaning political organization that might be available. Find your people and, through them, exert whatever influence you can to nudge this country just a little bit in the right direction. Understand that while you do this that you don’t have to endorse the Democrats or any other organization. As leftists, we understand that the Dems, for instance, are our best hope at improving this country. Doesn’t mean we have to like them, though.
Finding Mutual Aid – https://www.mutualaidhub.org/
Finding Your Leftists – https://abolitionnotes.org/leftist-organizations
If you are in a position, start making content. Work with the existing content creators and get your voice out there. Engage with the political sphere and unite your voice with other leftists so that together you may be heard above the endless noise of the Right. We will have no Powell on our side – no infinite pool of corporate money to draw from. The Left is, as always, a movement of the people. For the people. We have no single mouthpiece through which we can voice our discontent. Thus, we must do as we’ve always done and work together to enact the change we wish to see in the world.
Call / Contact / Meet your representatives. Once a week for the next four years. Tell them in explicit fucking detail what you want them to do, what you want them to say, what you want them to think. Don’t let the fucking Democrats decide what they want to learn about this loss. They will take all of the wrong lessons, the same way they do every time they drop the fucking ball. We need to bully them into being better representatives of their people. Relentlessly, and in such a volume that they can’t ignore us anymore.
Leftist Political Work – https://www.progressivevictory.win/
If you’re living in a red state with a fascist as your representative, still call them. Don’t attack them, because they will just disregard you. Unfortunately, we have to be more polite to the fascists than we do to the liberals. Make reasoned arguments, and show them that you are not one of the sheep that they think you are. Show them that their control is not complete and that they need to step lightly in their overreach.
(I am less certain about the last two paragraphs than I am the rest of this essay. If there are other perspectives that make more sense for getting liberals to work for you, or fascists to be scared, please comment with your ideas. I am open to changing my point of view and I want us to be effective over these next four years.)
Stop fighting other leftists. They don’t decry the genocide as hard as you do? I’m sorry, you’re right to be upset. But purity testing your allies to the point that they won’t work with you accomplishes nothing. It makes us weak and it makes us politically ineffective. This is not a time for that. If we are going to turn this country around, we need vigorous and relentless commitment to the common goal. That is something the Right has that we do not, because they’re buoyed by the religious fanatics.
For those who might reply with ‘Vanguard Party, Vanguard Party!’ I reply with fuck you. This isn’t about creating some new elite class of people who act as shepherds to the unenlightened flock. This is about reaching people where they are and understanding how they got there. In a perfect world, education would be extensive, comprehensive, and freely available. People would be informed because they choose to be, not because they watch propaganda pretending to inform them. If any of us ever attain a position in this country to enact education reform, then that would accomplish more than a century of liberal politics and rule.
I don’t advocate for you just showing this post to the people on the Right and saying ‘this is why you’re stupid’. Especially because I have not been polite in this post at all, and they will shut down at the first hint of hostility. This is more about you understanding THEM. They’re not your enemies. They’re victims of a Conservative ideology that seeks to keep them docile and ignorant and incapable of challenging them. These are your fellow Americans and, more importantly, your fellow human beings. They can be inhuman at times, but it is our responsibility as Leftists to try and help them. If they decline, then that’s fine, but try anyway.
The future depends on it.