Replying to Avatar Mikhail Rogov 🇷🇺

A primary defense against class war is an educated, informed public. Public education has come under harsh attack during the neoliberal years: sharp defunding, business models that favor cheap and easily disposable labor (adjuncts, graduate students) instead of faculty, teaching-to-test models that undermine critical thinking and inquiry, and much else. Best to have a population that is passive, obedient, and atomized, even if they are angry and resentful, and thus easy prey for demagogues skilled in tapping ugly currents that run not too far below the surface in every society.

— Noam Chomsky
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Aurelius 2y ago

A disinterested public that accepts that any civic participation is futile, is the goal of an oligarchy that advocates for democracy in name only. The shift from real representation in the Articles of Confederation to a more centralized and representative structure peddled by the Constitution, was designed to bypass the intrusive meddling by a decentralized populous.

The remaining voters are convinced by a complicit media that the salient issue in elections is “values,” not the endless wars, a faltering economy, or widening class differences.

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Aurelius 2y ago

There was a time when civic participation meant picketing, rioting, striking, writing, and marching. A hundred years of aggressive, bloody, and militarized responses to suppress insurrection, and a campaign by our rulers to convince the public that proper participation should be limited to voting and accepting the outcome, have left us with a citizenry who are in large part left out of any meaningful participation, and without any understanding of what civic participation really is.