The deeply, deeply unfortunate parts of intelligence tests to vote are two-fold:

• The first is that corrupt politicians use them as a cudgel to keep “the wrong people” from voting. This was seen during the US’ Jim Crow era, where southern states had intelligence tests to vote. These were intentionally confusing, and – as intended – black voters would be turned away for ridiculous, ad hoc nonsense. Moreover, any degree of intelligence test we can come up with today will have some degree of bias to it. Even clinical intelligence tests which are written and administered by expert neuropsychologists to be as unbiased as possible show some level of cultural bias.
• The second is that it’s ultimately not fair to refuse someone a say in how their life is run. Literally every aspect of our lives is political, and to not give the poorly educated or the intellectually disabled a say in that is simply not conducive to a fair society. It can even further entrench uneducation by removing these people from a process which can give them the right to an education or to special needs protections within that education.

The problem I feel the DNC needs to own up to is that ultimately, it doesn’t give the uneducated voters whose lives are worse off than they used to be a target to go after. They’re (thankfully) not explicitly bigoted like the Republican Party blaming it on “the other”, but they’re also not speaking truth to power like they should be; platforming on radical, populist change; and aggressively blaming the real sources of the average American’s problems. It’s also hugely Republican stonewalling that prevents them from taking the fight to these powerful institutions, but we saw Harris for instance start courting voters by taking a pro-fracking stance, backing off of criticisms of corporate America (who most people fucking hate for some reason or another at this point), cozying up to extremely unpopular politicians like Liz Cheney, and backing off of the sort of populist rhetoric that wins votes in this climate.

Republicans are even more favorable to the institutions that ruin American lives than the Democrats are and are orders of magnitude worse than Democrats, but they give the average person something to divert their frustration toward. Whereas Democrats say “we have some policies to help somewhat improve your lives” while never giving them something to be angry at. And to be clear, the average American has a good goddamn reason to be angry. They’re nauseatingly wrong to direct it to the places Trump wants them to and are creating their own and others’ oppression, but their poor circumstances broadly are caused by systems which the typical “moderate”, neoliberal Democrat kowtows to.

What we need to do is get out there as grassroots advocates and educate them not just about the issues, but about how they’ve been lied to by Republicans and (centrist) Democrats alike to work against their own interests. Some of them are truly beyond saving, but for the rest of them, we need to meet them where they’re at, affirm their right to be angry and show them we are too, and unify. It’ll be damn hard, but fascists win because they divide and conquer. Americans need a target, and instead of the ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities, there’s an even better minority for them: the rich elite.