“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” —John Dewey

I haven’t really written much about the 2016 U.S. presidential  election of Donald Trump because it’s been an overall hugely depressing nightmare for me. I have had a lot of in-person chats, Facebook discussions, and have also read a TON of articles, essays, reflections on how this all happened, what is going to happen, and what this all means.

Personally speaking, my main take away from this whole thing is that there really is no one main reason we can point to for why this happened. It really is a complex mishmash of ignorance, racism (conscious and unconscious), sexism (conscious and unconscious), xenophobia (conscious and unconscious), misinformed/misunderstood/just plain bad political and economic ideologies, misinformed/misunderstood/just plain bad theology, voter suppression, fear, classism (conscious and unconscious), and arrested psychosocial value development. And as much as I hate to say this (because I don’t want to sound like a Trump-like conspiracy theorist), we do also have the media to consider; like it or not the ways we get information ends up shaping our views, and unfortunately the majority of our digested “content” is less like meaningful intellectual health food and MORE like sensationalized entertainment junk food. (Also, there is this)

Additionally, even though I personally voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, I was able to cultivate genuine support for Clinton and ended up viewing her relatively favorably (as much as one who classifies themself as an anarcho-socialist can). However, I’m afraid that the various analyses out there are correct in that many people were severely underwhelmed with Clinton; she was probably not the right candidate to run (let’s be honest, Republicans have been trained to hate her for decades), especially against Trump.

One article that I read today at philly.com sort of gets at the heart of things for me, however. The writer takes a road trip to rural Pennsylvania (my home state, which hasn’t gone red in quite a while) and talks to some folks from Potter county. The topic of the article is relevant because, all other things being said, lower income, undereducated rural white folks voted for Trump overwhelmingly, which is surprising since this group has not enthusiastically voted for anyone like this since the 80’s (rich educated white people also voted for Trump, but this is no surprise), and their main gripe was “economic insecurity” and “government overreach.” In the philly.com article, a Ukranian immigrant (Olga), who is now a U.S. citizen, is quoted and what she said really cracked me up (and made me really sad at the same time). She talks about not liking socialism (apparently basing this on the unique brand of social authoritarianism she experienced in the USSR), and wanting a limited government, pro-business approach instead. But immediately after this she goes on to talk about how so many people have great government jobs with good paychecks in this country, but people who are on their own (workers in the private sector, small business owners, etc.) have to work 18 hour days to survive. She’s very dangerously confused in my opinion.

Nevertheless, this woman’s confused but honest sentiment really does strike a chord and get at what I think is a very serious problem that has to be dealt with moving forward: lack of continuous and rigorous education. Now, full disclosure, I do work at a liberal arts university but I don’t want this to come off in any way as some liberal elitist platitude. Quite the contrary. In fact the way I’m thinking about this is in-line with many grassroots activists who insist that, perhaps moving forward, something which needs to be of critical central focus for progressive/leftist type folks is to think about how to involve and excite more people about political action/engagement. It seems clear to me that systemic disenfranchisement, in particular, has huge negative effects in that (among other things) it creates severe apathy and hopelessness in those vulnerable and oppressed groups which are most affected. As one who thinks of themself as a Christian then, one of my main tasks is to constantly remind those who are facing despair that Sunday is coming, and that there is hope in that we don’t have to live this way but can, instead, discover other ways to live and think and organize life. So when I say that I think education is a key, I’m not talking about expensive college as a means to an ultimate end of getting a job and making big bucks. No. I’m talking about grassroots political theory education for the people, as well as philosophy and theology and sociology and psychology and literature and science and arts education. FOR. THE. PEOPLE. Where or how this happens or takes shape is the fun and imaginative part, but really, even super practical stuff like how our government works (I mean if people are anything like me then they totally missed all of that civics shit in junior high and high school) is basic stuff that could have very powerful and practical concrete effects. Learning new things can have some very revolutionary implications. Dewey on education and democracy here:

“Modern life means democracy, democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectiveness the emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.”

Anyway, I feel this is where my time should be spent in my community because democracy doesn’t work well if people are uninformed and kept in the dark; Plato knew this, Dewey knew this as well. If nothing else, this election is clear evidence of that. Too many working poor people think that shrinking our democratic government (which is made up of “we the people”), making it valueless, and removing restrictions from business will somehow make life better for workers. These folks also believe that a billionaire capitalist will help liberate them from long working hours and meager pay. They think a trust fund real-estate mogul, who doesn’t want to live in the White House full time because he usually sleeps on a bed of gold like Smaug from the Hobbit, is an outsider who will bring real “change.”  Sadly, it’s more likely the case that he simply represents the other handcuff binding us.

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Painting above: Carnival Of Democracy by Richard Hubal

Tags:classdemocracyeducationeletion2016John DeweypoliticsTrump