For decades, the GOP has worked to defund public education, foster mistrust of science and other subject-matter experts, and promoted efforts to replace fact-based curricula with counterfactual, faith-based pap. As a result, large swathes of the Republican electorate are uninformed, uncritical, and unemployable as the technically-skilled workers who are still seeing wage growth.
I’m not sure if the persistent underclass they’ve created is a direct goal of Republican policies or just a happy accident. Either way, it is a sizable voting block, chock-full of economic and class resentment, tailor made for exploitation by a populist demagogue.
Any strategy that weaponizes anger and inequity courts disaster. I wonder how long the GOP will be able to hold onto the reins?
