I don’t think Vaush should be arguing for civic literacy tests.
I think that the stream segment Vaush uploaded today about the stupid MAGA woman lacked systemic analysis and overly focused on individual punishment/cultural antagonism. The civic literacy test argument kind of reminded me of something he would’ve argued against in the past, much like the authoritarian crackdown that Trudeau did against that trucker strike during COVID.
I think he’s had this sort of anti-democracy bent for awhile (even prior to 2024 if I recall), but his wholehearted argument for civic literacy tests just struck me as really missing the point. He touched on a lot of the key counterarguments, but I don’t think he really deeply engaged with them beyond a few one-sentence chat messages and ended up with the wrong conclusion. He basically argued that democracy is urgently dying so civics tests are kind of a “necessary evil” to prevent rural MAGA people from keeping the country in a chokehold, even if they could be mismanaged by an ill-intentioned administration in the future, much like prisons or police.
This really is not the solution we need. For one, literacy tests like these are not a political tennis ball. Even on the off chance that some superpowered DSA administration sweeps the country and designs some committed, anti-rural test, there is simply no way that that test would not affect millions of impoverished and education-deprived minorities living in urban areas. The reality of America, here and now, is that the education system is set up in such a way to deprive minorities of education. A lot of rural whites are also caught up in that, and it does produce MAGA people. However, unless this test came with some seismic shift in racial politics that completely upended poverty and discrimination, it would just disenfranchise minorities even further. This isn’t some racist thing about “hurr durr ‘inner city kids’ wouldn’t understand how the senate works,” it’s just the reality of literacy tests. Minorities in 1920 weren’t too innately stupid or so opposed to education that they couldn’t answer literacy tests, they were disproportionately deprived of education then, and they still are today.
Secondly, I don’t really buy that plain stupidity is the reason that rural dumbfucks are overrepresented. Every political stop and trick available to red states is used to weigh their votes much heavier than blue states. LA county has like 16x the population of the entire state of Wyoming, but an LA county (likely Democrat) vote weighs 3-4x less than a Wyoming (likely Republican) vote. Why not argue against the Electoral College, or the Senate, or actually try and explain how states like Texas or Florida go out of their way to elevate the votes of the uneducated white rural voters and disenfranchise the votes of uneducated urban minorities? He has done all of this in the past, so I don’t really understand how a literacy test comes into play here.
Also, let’s not pretend it’s entirely a literacy thing here. College-educated voters generally swing more towards Democrats, but the split is much less pronounced among white, college-educated voters. 44% of them still voted Republican. Sure, that’s a more handed advantage towards the Democrats, especially when you consider how non-college educated whites voted, but it isn’t like Trump’s base entirely rests on dumb white hicks in Iowa. A lot of white people, especially men, like his racial anxiety rhetoric regardless of their education. Racism encourages stupidity, and it can and often does override the education of white people.
It just seemed to miss the point for me. I generally agree with Vaush when it comes to his anti-rural arguments, but I don’t want to see it become decoupled from actual systemic analysis. They’re easy and often justifiable targets to shit on, but a national project of just saying “fuck you” to them isn’t gonna fix the country, and it’s inevitably going to get swept up in the tidal force of systemic oppression against minorities.