The inability for intelligent people to frame their policies and positions in ways very stupid simple people can understand is the biggest failing of the last 50+ years if not longer.
They believe that the set of values and beliefs that they hold true or false advantage them and perceive education as an attack on their values. Most if them are happy to degrade and diminish anyone who tries some are willing to murder.
The problem is rarely the ability to understand. It is the ability (or desire) to listen that many lack.
Feels like this whole thread is trying to pin this on individual preferences or whatever. But it’s a social effect, and individual personalities or intelligence have very little to do with it. If you lived in these communities, unless you are neurodivergent, you would be doing the same thing.
As someone who grew up in one of these communities, this has not been my experience. Many, many people move away, and for varied reasons. What you're left with are people who stay in economically declining areas and want to blame everyone else for it. It's selection bias, and it is absolutely based on personal choice.
Strangely enough, though, a billionaire slumlord from New York is never what people mean when they say 'elites'.
What's happening is that the Republicans have captured populist messaging pretty well, the Democrats just haven't.
Populism is usually stupid but it's extremely effective if you can flood information stream, particularly new ones. I mean, Radio pretty much made Hitler.
The timing here is perfect. Internet has just become mainstream and is still trusted and our brains haven't developed patterns of discernment. In addition, the economy for every day working people is bad. Its the perfect breeding ground for populism.
A genie says to a Russian, “I will grant you one wish.”
The Russian says, “I want a million dollars.”
The genie says, “… but whatever I give you, I will give your neighbor two of.”
The Russian responds, “Well in that case, I want a poke in the eye!”
The problem isn’t lack of intelligence but the information space they inhabit and the feeling that they have somehow been mistreated. There’s an entire genre of “why are leopards eating my face?” schadenfreude posts about MAGAs asking why Trump is doing some “surprising” thing he said he was going to do for years. Because they’re _not_ stupid, once they’ve thrown in with a side they’ll put a lot of effort into coming up with rationalizations or attacks to try to “balance” things out. The bitter grievances are really powerful because they let people talk themselves into seeing things as necessary sacrifices: sure, you’re losing Medicaid and paying more in taxes but the alternative is living in a world where Riley Gaines was forced to tie for fifth so I guess you just have to tighten your belt on behalf of female athletes.
The people who voted for Trump (or against Biden) because they hadn't been paying attention over the last decade and just thought the price of eggs was too high were stupid. The people who knew exactly what Trump was about and just didn't think the leopards would eat their faces were stupid. The people who voted because they just wanted to be entertained watching the world burn were stupid.
There's more than one kind of stupidity, and when they combine en masse into a big dumb avalanche it can absolutely be dangerous.
I live in DC so right now a lot of my neighbors are having surreal conversations with their extended family members who are saying things which would make sense if you started with certain false pretenses like all of the police statistics being faked. One of them was telling me about how they were talking with someone who had an Ivy degree, serious job, etc. but wouldn’t believe that our downtown wasn’t a movie gangland even though his own relative was telling him they take young kids in those area all the time and never see anything more unsafe than an out of control toddler on a bike. They kept coming up with complicated “maybe you missed” theories because they couldn’t bear to question that one starting premise. If you want to call that stupid, sure, but I think we might want a different term it.
This doesn't matter when the intelligent people are working within the confines of reality and their opposition lies gratuitously. The stupid people are choosing the option they want to believe and apparently no amount of education or framing is going to change that.
"disease very bad. disease may kill. inject this. you less likely to get disease."
=> "How dare you infringe upon my bodily freedom!"
Realistically, how farther down can we dumb things from here?
The actual argument is that by everyone getting injected, society as a whole crosses a threshold where viruses fail to spread exponentially and don't cause pandemics.
It's a more nuanced, more complex reason that some (incredibly selfish) people are just unable to grasp.
"Why would I ever a tiny personal risk to stop other people getting sick!?" was a very common argument during the COVID pandemic.
its a very american take, but unfortunately that particular mind virus has spread very far and wide
you have to respect people, you have to care about their agency even to their detriment or else who are you saving?
Civilization.
The easy way to spread a pro-health message to the people who really need to comply with it is to say "letting disease spread is Nergal worship (2 Kings 17:30), and America is a Christian nation." Just spam that, nonstop, until it is as embedded in their minds as whatever derangement Trump has come up with this time - because this is the kind of thing they respond to.
The second thing is more complicated: to admit that a lot of "sexual health" only applies to people engaging in highly risky behavior, and should be handled separately both in messaging and in practice from general health. You can still make them support it, but with an explicit "do good even to the sinner" messaging. Throw in a few "We are currently promoting abortion because free school lunches have been canceled" and you WILL see movement.
Both of these are considered abominable among the current Democrat party, because it involves speaking the language of people with different values.
It doesn't matter how much you cite Matthew 19:24 to someone who already had their brain rotted by, say, prosperity gospel. They don't give a shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia#Conservative_Bib...
It met a good amount of backlash, though.
I've seen intelligent people fall for crazy conspiracy theories. Once all those antivaxers became pro-Russia, which basically has nothing to do with each other, it became clear were all this disinformation was coming from (talking mainly about Central Europe here, but I'm sure it applies to US too)
Not necessarily the case, as Russia has a longstanding record of propagating public-health misinformation. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39419560 for instance.
This has been a part of their national agenda since the Communist revolution. "If we can't improve our own country, at least we can fuck up everybody else's."