The necessity of an educated and informed electorate has never been more urgent.

[lees1975]

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-importance-of-educated-and-informed.html

George Washington addresses the issues that we are facing with this unconstitutional, incompetent and corrupt Trump Presidency as if he were observing them himself. So it's not that the founders, when designing American democracy, writing and ratifying the Constitution, and establishing the Republic, did not forsee the possibility of a corrupt, criminal element, influenced by foreign powers and driven by money interests, gaining control of the government to serve their own narrow purposes and those of the other billionares who influence the politics. Washington saw this as a possibility.

They put plenty of safeguards in place, including making the Constitution amendable, not expecting a strict constructionist approach, but that as society and the culture changed, the Constitution could adapt to the change. The safeguards in making those changes was wisely requiring two-thirds of the members of Congress to agree, and two-thirds of the states having to ratify their agreement. The safeguard which the founders believed to be the best defense against "ill-concerted and incongruous projects of factions," a description which fits Trumpism perfectly, was "the power and right of the people to establish government."

So Washington believed that an informed electorate, with the power and right of the people behind them, wouldn't elect a convicted felon, or a con artist, or a grifter, or a corrupt, known pathological liar, like Trump to any office where they had any influence in government. An educated and informed electorate was, to the founders, a wall of protection to the Constitution against a subversive, and in this case, seditious faction.

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the fabric?

Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.--George Washington, First Farewell Address [emphasis mine]

[Historic NY]

1. But were dealing with a pathetically incompetent media, print, press and social media

Organized to spew and collect clicks, rather than dig deeply.

[lees1975]

3. If you'll read further in the linked article, the flaws in an "educated and informed electorate" are covered.

They include the total loss of a free press, the corrupt infusion of the religious cult of Evangelicalism allied with right wing extremism which replaced Washington's confidence in religious moral values being a safeguard, and the undoing of John Dewey's reforms in public education. Dewey built a system by which public education was not only improved and upgraded significantly, but was turned into an instrument capable of supporting the social reforms necessary to deal with human problems, such as poverty, and war. He built a teacher training system that placed teachers who were equipped and educated social reformers into the classrooms. Republicans are engaged in an attack on public education, in many states they've knocked out the social studies requirements, removed the ability of teachers to introduce anything they don't like, pull funding when they can and are trying to mandate forced religion in the classrooms.

[sop]

2. An educated and informed electorate is a wall of protection against a subversive and seditious faction.

That's why subversive and seditious factions dismantled public schools and neutered the free press.

[Hitorque]

4. And that's the fundamental flaw of our founding fathers

Proper Democracy operates on the assumption that the electorate has more than two collective brain cells to rub together, and only the best, brightest and most capable among us would stand for office...

[lees1975]

5. I wonder what Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and some others would think about the inability of the DOJ

and of Congress to get around to finding a way to protect the government from an existential threat like Trump. Washington, in his farewell address, nailed the kind of character that Trump has, and why it shouldn't ever be allowed to touch the reins of power. I don't think they would understand the inability or incompetence, whatever it was, that stymied the Justice Department, rendering it completely ineffective in dealing with an existential threat to democracy like Trump. They would have crushed him before he had a chance to say, "I'm running again." The means exist for doing that, it's just that no one was decisive or competent enough to use them.