How Can the GOP Win?

Today’s Election Day in the town where I live (in Massachusetts) and the ballot will let me vote for members of the Town Council and the School Committee, along with Library Trustees. The election for Library Trustees is the big deal this year, because they will determine how much the town will spend on a new library, which means they will decide how many additional dollars I’ll have to pay in my goddamn town real estate tax.

When the first colonists showed up in Plymouth and began establishing permanent settlements in New England, they decreed that every town would build a school and hire a full-time teacher who would teach all the kids how to read and write. The costs of this required education would be covered by taxes on property, which is still how public education is paid for in this town today.

The reason that primary education was required in the original colonies is that the colonial leaders believed that the British monarchy had kept itself in power back in England by keeping the population illiterate, and the idea that political freedom and literacy took flower in the New World and stuck.

Believe it or not, this idea of connecting education to political activity was the theory behind the imposition of the poll tax in the South. To keep 4 million new human beings from exercising the basic rights of citizenship after the Civil War, the redneck…