How did American voters get so dumb? Thank a public school.
It’s a modern fetish that we’re brilliant but our ancestors were idiots. After all, they didn’t have iPhones, internets, or Kim Kardashian.
This is also academic consensus, for what it’s worth. It’s called the Flynn Effect—the idea is people do better on puzzles, so we must be smarter. Of course, one wonders if puzzles translate into, say, understanding monetary policy or how welfare destroys families.
Thankfully, we have a real-world test: actual political campaigns. Back when I was a professor, I ran every inaugural address through a Flesch-Kincaid text analysis to measure the grade level. The logic being top speechwriters know how to talk at voters’ level.
Doing that, it turns…
