America’s Education Crisis Is No Accident: How Ignorance Became a Political Strategy
S. E. Anderson
America’s multi-tiered public educational system has failed to educate most Americans, and that outcome is by design. Strategic. Deliberate. Not a tragic accident, not a whoopsie-daisy of bureaucracy—more like a long-running infrastructure project where the blueprint is “keep ‘em just smart enough to clock in, just tired enough to never ask why.”
Lord Trump—patron saint of petty grifts and champagne ignorance—actually said the quiet part out loud: he loves the “poorly educated.” Of course he does. He’s a pimp, a Big Apple hustler who understands the oldest business model on Earth: it’s easier to sell somebody sand in the desert if they never learned the word “scam.” His peers know it. Some of his supporters know it. His like-minded white supremacists and the leaders of his Make America Great/White Again cult know it. Mild education is the perfect temperature for manipulation—warm enough to feel informed, not hot enough to burn through propaganda.
And the elites—by which I mean the small-“a” aristocrats in gated communities, the Investor Class clawing their way up the hedge-fund ladder, and the fatcats who treat democracy like a timeshare—don’t want an enlightened workforce. They want a labor force dumb, docile, and easily hypnotized by anything shiny and loud. Bread and circus. Same recipe, new packaging. Swap the coliseum for cable news. Replace lions with algorithms. Add a little “culture war” seasoning and serve hot.
The NFL. The Real Housewives of Anywhere USA.
So when it comes to economics and politics, most Americans couldn’t accurately define, break down, and illustrate “communism,” “democracy,” “fascism,” “capitalism,” or “socialism” if their mortgage depended on it—and it usually does. That means “democratic socialist” lands on the average ear like prehistoric Chinese written in hieroglyphics—confusing, suspicious, and ripe for some talk-radio host to translate into “they’re coming for your pickup and your Baby Jesus.”
Meanwhile, the intellectual base of the political Left is out here sweating bricks, trying to reach the unwashed masses—trying to organize labor against a highly organized, well-funded, disciplined oligarchy that has taken hold of the White House and treats the Constitution like a suggestion box.
And here’s the harsh reality: the Democratic Party consists of everybody white folks hate. That’s not an insult; that’s a demographic fact with a long police report attached. We represent the vast array of people, ideals, and interests that mainstream white male power has historically resisted, ridiculed, or restrained. That’s our binding thread, our commonality: we are the coalition of the disliked.
We are Black, Brown, red and yellow—the groups MAGA blindly hates. The negro lovers, the Tree Huggers and the Gay folks. We are rich and poor, educated and uneducated, religious and nonreligious, urban and suburban. To mainstream White America, you’re either poor trash or uppity trash. Either way, trash. “Know your place,” they say—except the place keeps shrinking, and the sign on the door keeps changing.
That’s what the fight in America is about today: ending integration and restoring the preferred segregation that Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa admired, studied, and refined into policy. Am I lying? No, I’m not. The only debate is whether they want segregation with polite language and zoning maps, or segregation with sirens and armbands. Same goal—different marketing department.
Now here’s the connection: the Left must come up with—by hand, with intention—a plan the little people can understand and rally behind. Not a graduate seminar. Not a 38-point policy PDF with footnotes. A banner. A moral story with clear villains and clear benefits. Something that hits the stomach before it hits the brain.
Perhaps it is the creation of, the morphing of, the Democrat Party into the Democrat Socialist Party over the next decade: a party of the people and by the people that organizes all the people MAGA hates into a political force to be reckoned with.
It’s that Romper Room simple, baby.
And if you need a ready-made American blueprint—one with a flag stitched into it and a pedigree that makes conservatives choke on their own accusations—steal from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
FDR’s proposed “Second Bill of Rights” (1944) widened the American definition of freedom beyond purely political liberties to include economic security—arguing that rights like decent work, housing, healthcare, and education are prerequisites for genuine liberty, in the same way the original Bill of Rights safeguards political freedoms. In other words: freedom isn’t just the right to vote; it’s the ability to live without being economically kneecapped at every turn. Freedom is not begging your boss for health insurance like you’re asking a king for bread. Freedom is not living one broken ankle away from bankruptcy court.
And while it wasn’t explicitly “municipal socialism,” the agenda—paired with New Deal programs—overlapped with some socialist principles, especially decommodification: treating core necessities as obligations of society rather than products ruled solely by the market. It helped shape later policies and institutions such as Social Security and public housing. Yet FDR was clear: he wasn’t trying to replace capitalism—he was trying to civilize it. Keep private enterprise as the engine, but install guardrails so the thing stops mowing down pedestrians.
That’s the whole point the “laissez-faire or die” crowd never wants to admit: unregulated capitalism doesn’t “self-correct.” It self-concentrates. It doesn’t “lift all boats.” It buys the marina, raises the docking fees, and then lectures you about personal responsibility while you drown.
FDR’s Second Bill of Rights boils down to one central claim: freedom is hollow without economic stability, so government must help guarantee a baseline standard of living. He named the rights plainly, like someone who wanted working people to understand them without a translator:
The right to a job—useful, adequately paid work. The right to enough food, clothing, and a little rest and recreation—because life is not supposed to be an endless treadmill powered by anxiety. The right of farmers to fair compensation. The right to be protected from unfair business practices and monopolistic competition. The right to decent housing. The right to adequate medical care and good health. The right to protection from the major economic hazards of life—old age, sickness, unemployment. The right to a good education.
That list is not “radical.” It’s not “communism.” It’s the bare minimum of what a wealthy, modern republic should guarantee if it wants to keep calling itself a republic, a civilization, with a straight face.
So how do you implement it today—how do you smuggle it into the political bloodstream as a “Democratic Socialist Trojan Horse” without triggering the Pavlovian panic attack that happens whenever Americans hear the word “socialism”?
You do what FDR did: you call it what it is. A Second Bill of Rights. An American promise. A freedom project. And you sell it as the thing it truly is: the antidote to laissez-faire capitalism’s favorite sport—turning human needs into profit opportunities.
You build the platform around a simple, unforgettable frame: “Political rights mean nothing without economic rights.” Then you anchor every modern policy plank to that sentence like it’s a ship’s mooring line in a hurricane.
You translate each right into visible, practical programs people can touch:
A job guarantee or public works surge—modern WPA—repairing bridges, schools, water systems, broadband, wildfire mitigation, climate resilience. Not “make-work,” but nation-work. Housing as infrastructure: a massive build-and-rehab program, zoning carrots and sticks, public housing done right, community land trusts, and aggressive anti-speculation enforcement so Wall Street stops treating shelter like a casino chip. Healthcare as a right: expand public options until “coverage” isn’t a coupon book tied to your employer’s mood. Education as a right: universal pre-K, debt-free public college/trade pathways, and funding formulas that stop punishing poor districts like poverty is a character flaw.
And here’s the key: you do not pitch this as “ending capitalism.” You pitch it as civilizing capitalism—ending the laissez-faire fantasy that markets are moral beings. You say, out loud: private enterprise can thrive, but it will no longer be allowed to harvest people’s misery for shareholder value. You turn the market back into a tool, not a god.
Wrap it all in patriotic language so thick you could pave a highway with it. Make the opposition argue against “rights.” Make them explain, on camera, why Americans deserve free speech but not a roof. Why we deserve the right to bear arms but not insulin. Why we can fund wars in seconds but can’t fund childcare without a congressional exorcism.
That’s the Trojan Horse: not hiding the agenda, but hiding the scare word—because the substance is already mainstream when you describe it in human terms. People don’t hate the policy; they hate the caricature.
And the ending—the big bang—writes itself if you’ve got the nerve to say it:
America doesn’t need less government. It needs less corporate government. We don’t need more “freedom” as defined by billionaires—freedom to exploit, freedom to pollute, freedom to underpay, freedom to buy elections like they’re clearance items. We need freedom for regular people: freedom from medical bankruptcy, freedom from rent extortion, freedom from being one layoff away from sleeping in your car while some CEO gets a bonus for “cost-cutting.”
So yes—let the Democrats become the so-called Trojan Horse. Roll it right up to the gates of this rotten, laissez-faire palace. But when it opens, don’t let it be filled with slogans and consultants. Let it be filled with rights—jobs, housing, healthcare, education—because that’s what FDR was really offering: not socialism, not charity, not a handout.
A dare.
A dare to make America live up to its own mythology.
And if capitalism can’t survive being civilized—if it collapses the moment we stop letting it chew through human beings like disposable batteries—then it wasn’t an economic system.
It was a hostage situation.
Have a Happy, Happy New Year babies…. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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