‘I love the poorly educated’, said Donald Trump a few years ago (https://www.politico.com/video/2016/02/donald-trump-i-love-the-poorly-educated-044575). And of course Trump himself is poorly educated. Is that one of the factors behind his political success? And, incidentally, behind his assault on top American universities?

It may also be a reason for the anticipated success of the ‘Reform’ party in Britain today. Repeated surveys have shown that support for right-wing causes there is stronger among the relatively uneducated than among (for example) college graduates. (Here’s one example:  https://www.statista.com/statistics/572613/brexit-votes-by-education/?srsltid=AfmBOop9VLvHYH158J12Zw97L43OwL-NOre_cK1Qp_6LXnib5Wj_AQMf.) The same is apparently true in the USA. Which might suggest that the solution to the problem, if you see it as a problem, is more – or better – education for (the) hoi polloi.

For those of us who do see it as problematical, fears of what in earlier times was called ‘the mob’ are conjured up. These fears lay behind the restrictions that were placed on the British political franchise during the whole of the 19th century and a good way into the twentieth, to exclude non-property owners, and women. (Also incidentally peers; but only because they had a ‘House’ of their own.) Women were excluded on the grounds that they were too unstable (‘hysterical’) to vote; the relatively poor for lacking a sufficient material stake or ‘interest’ in the country. These ‘lower’ classes (and blacks in America) were also seen as vulnerable to what today we would call ‘left-wing’ propaganda, which would endanger the very foundations of what was, in effect, a property-owning democracy. For this reason, fears of the ‘mob’ then were mainly directed against popular ‘socialism’.

Which might surprise those old-timers about today’s situation; where the ‘mobs’ are mostly found on the political Right. This is not unprecedented in Britain: vide the ‘Church and King’ riots in Birmingham in 1791, and the ‘jingo’ demonstrations of 1899 in support of the Boer War. (The USA, I’m sure, had its historical equivalents.) Present-day demonstrations against foreign immigration follow in this tradition, illustrating the spread and depth of ‘reactionary’ opinion in today’s Britain.

We probably shouldn’t blame the ‘poorly educated’ themselves for this, if only because to do so would leave us open to the charge of ‘élitism’; a powerful tool of the Right these days, and one which no amount of intelligent – élitist – argument can dispel. But in any case we need to be aware of the pressures that many of the ‘poorly educated’ labour under, from the Right-wing propaganda directed at them by most of the media, and from which – Daily Mail headlines, for example – it must be difficult for them to escape. The purveyors of this propaganda are not generally‘poorly educated’ – in most cases rather the reverse; but simply unprincipled and – I would say – wicked. (I’m thinking here of course of Rupert Murdoch.) Maybe better education – in ‘critical thinking’, for example – could act as a prophylactic against this; plus stricter regulation of Britain’s notoriously amoral and partisan popular press (Leveson II?). We can but hope.

These may be the only ways to counter ‘populism’; which is today’s word to describe what in the past would have been characterised as ‘mob rule’. Either that; or again restrict the franchise, this time to what in the Middle Ages was called the maior et sanior pars – major and wiser part – of the population; with educational (rather than property) tests to wean the not-so-‘sanior’ out. But that would be very un-populist; and also undemocratic, in strict terms (‘demos’). The way of education and press regulation must be preferable. I’d trust it much more than what we have now.