Over the past six years after every election, a relatively common
question is why do so many Americans dependably vote against their own
self-interests. Despite poor white people in red states barely
surviving on slave wages, welfare, food stamps, and no adequate
healthcare, they routinely vote for repugicans openly campaigning on
driving their constituents deeper into poverty. It is true that
opposition to Democrats as surrogates for an African American President
is driven by racial animus, but even that fails to explain poor white
voters electing abusive repugicans promising to eliminate programs that
keep them alive and block Democratic attempts to lift them out of
poverty.
Founding Father Thomas Jefferson understood how
abusive repugicans could succeed, if only they kept the population
unenlightened, or in street vernacular blind, dumb, and stupid.
Jefferson said, “I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the
society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened
enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the
remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by
education. This is the true corrective of abuses of power.”
That was in 1820, but even before that Jefferson
wrote that “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of
the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe
depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved
to a certain degree. Therefore, it is imperative that the nation see to
it that a suitable education be provided for all its citizens.”
Jefferson was not the first man to identify the death knell of
democracy, or “self-government,” was an uneducated populace. The repugicans
understand they could hardly garner any electoral support if the
population was educated and informed, so they have went to extraordinary
and, often, unconstitutional lengths to keep the populace ignorant by
cutting education funding. Whether it is transferring public school
funding to private, religious, or under-performing charter schools, or
just slashing education funding, repugicans will employ any measure to
keep Americans stupid so they will vote against their own
self-interests.
Last Thursday, another judge ruled that repugicans in Texas used an unconstitutional scam
to starve public schools and produce another generation of ignorant
Texans to vote for repugicans. The Texas ruling was a repudiation of
gubernatorial candidate Gregg Abbot’s defense of slashing well over $5
billion from public schools using an unconstitutional property tax scam.
However, the means of slashing public education funding is unimportant,
but it is a growing trend among repugican-misled states whose goal is
simply to maintain a base of support among uneducated voters.
Last week a judge in North Carolina ruled that a repugican privatization scheme was unconstitutional because
it defunded public schools by shifting public education funds to
private and charter religious schools. The judge correctly stated that
the repugican scheme was to “siphon money from the public schools in
favor of private schools, fund non-public schools that discriminate on
account of religion, and to shift “public taxpayer money to private
religious schools that have no legal obligation to teach them anything.”
Besides a dirty privatization scam, N.C. repugicans want to keep the
next generation of voters blind, dumb, and stupid so they will support
policies that keep them in distress.
Last year in Kansas a judge ruled that Sam Brownback’s Draconian cuts to public education were unconstitutional;
particularly because the lack of funding was due to using taxpayer
dollars to fund unsustainable tax cuts for the rich. Brownback, like all repugicans, desperately needs an ignorant and uneducated citizenry who
regularly fall for the insane notion that taking money from the people
to enrich corporations and the wealthy is key to an economic Utopia. It
is noteworthy that the storied “trickle down” theory has existed for
about a generation, and the people that were denied a decent education
then ignorantly support Brownback’s economic lunacy that has the state
suffering three recent credit downgrades and flirting with bankruptcy in
the very near future. It is even likely that people suffering the
drastic social program cuts enacted by repugicans will vote for
Brownback because they are too stupid to understand they are voting
against their own survival.
Another repugican state, Louisiana, is fighting
federal and
state court
lawsuits due to Bobby Jindal’s unconstitutional scheme of
stealing from public schools to fund private religious institutions.
Jindal, like all repugicans, depends on uneducated voters to support
policies against their own self-interests such as rejecting free
Medicaid expansion funding, giving free rein to dirty energy industry to
foul Louisiana’s air and water, and cut social programs ignorant and
uneducated citizens require to survive.
The common theme in keeping their citizens ignorant
and uninformed is pandering to voters’ irrational fears. It is why repugicans’ claim Democrats are subverting their religious freedom,
taking god out of schools, coming for their guns, and imposing Marxism,
Socialism, or communism on the people. If any American does not believe
how ignorance borne of an uneducated populace drives opposition to
policies that help Americans, take heed of the number of times repugican and teabagger voters bemoan President Obama’s Marxist or
socialist policies revealing they have no idea what Marxist or socialist
policies entail. If one wants to end a debate, or conversation with a wingnut parroting repugican shrieking points, ask them when the
government came for their guns, what Marxism or socialism is, how their
religious liberty, was subverted, or how President Obama is shredding
the Constitution; a document they have never read, much less understand
at even a rudimentary level.
It is beyond refute that if the citizens of this
country were informed and educated, repugicans would be hard-pressed to
get elected as dog-catchers, much less legislators. The assault on
public education goes beyond repugican-controlled states as evidenced
by congressional repugicans regularly cutting education funding. They, repugicans, know that if the public were educated, they could not
demean science as the work of the devil, or claim contraception is
abortion, or push the christian bible as true science. There is a reason
so many morons in the wingnut coven are certain that god
created America, wrote the Constitution, established America’s borders,
and installed christianity as the state religion, and it is simply due
to their inability to pick up a history book or the founding document to
check repugican lies for veracity.
Americans are not unintelligent, but a fair
proportion of them are dirt stupid; it is the only reason a repugican
ever gets elected. What repugicans are doing in the states to education
is to maintain an ignorant, superstitious, and uninformed voting bloc
as well as prepare the next generation to regularly vote against their
own best interests. They will continue using any means to destroy public
education because they know, as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson said,
the only “true corrective of abuses of power is to see to it that a
suitable education be provided for all its citizens.” It is a corrective
that repugicans are waging a fierce battle against because their
electoral survival depends on keeping their supporters uneducated,
uninformed, and frankly, stupid from religion.
