Maybe too many Americans are dumb.

[ancianita]

44. You are absolutely RIGHT. They're dumb. They dumbly choose against reading and lifelong learning as essential.

Because they're free to be dumb about reading/lifelong learning, and that those are important for a citizen to do, they don't know what secures or endangers their freedoms.

Dumb voters vote for dumb, oligarch-funded leaders who keep handing their taxes over to the oligarchs while raising the national debt and lowering their economic and tax benefits. Since Reagan we Democrats have been dragging both along, cleaning up their messes, which they're told by oligarch owned corporate media to blame Democrats for.

Forty years of this evil neoliberal strategy.

As of today, the dumb don't necessarily think that Republican leaders care about them, just about hurting who they both won't admit hatred for -- women and anyone not male and white. They think their shared "values" are virtues. They and their leaders don't know and don't want to know what democratic virtues are.
They both think they can create "reality by consensus" -- a fact free map -- so they never have to face the damage they do. And corporate media profits from playing right along.

Back in the days of Air America Radio, Chuck D called it the "dumbassification of America."