An uneducated society is easy to manipulate — easy to convince that climate change isn't real, that evolution is a conspiracy against religion, that creating a social safety net and investing in public education, health care and modern infrastructure is a bad thing.

I hate to turn social issues into black and white, partisan debates. But anti-intellectualism and the denigration of education is a uniquely right-wing phenomenon in the U.S. It's used often by the Republican party here to criticize "elites" and is employed by a long list of other power-hungry demagogues throughout world history [1].

Isaac Asimov wrote a column in January 1980 in Newsweek that describes this phenomenon in the U.S.:

> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

I encourage everyone to read the full column [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism [2]: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...