What's Wrong with the United States? We're really ignorant, and its getting worse.

Can you imagine this scene today?  The older man (who in context is probably in his 50s) would be staring blankly into space, while the young woman looked at TikTok videos.

21% of adults in the US are illiterate. 54% of American adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level. 

And we wonder how Trump got elected?

The illiterate are ignorant, and blisteringly ignorant people vote for stupid stuff.

I had a very strange experience the other day, which I need to be indistinct about.

It had to do with homeschooling.

Twice in recent weeks I've run across a topic that's in the legislature, that being the legal requirement, which the Wyoming 2025 Legislative assembly is about to wipe out, that home schooling parents submit their educational plans to their local school districts.  The requirement is there to prevent parents from basically not educating their children.

Not educating children is what homeschooling is all about.

This wasn't always the case, but it's become the case.  

Some background.

My father was the first male in his family to graduate from high school.  He might have been the third member of the family, as I don't know that much about my paternal grandmother's early life in that fashion.  She probably graduated high school in Denver however, likely from a Catholic high school.  His older sister graduated from a high school in Scottsbluff.

My father went on to a doctorate.

My paternal grandfather, who left school to work at age 13, had such an advance knowledge of mathematics that he helped his children with their high school calculus homework, which is revealing for two reasons, one that is amazing on his part, and secondly all of my father's siblings took calculus in high school.

I didn't take calculus in high school

My father could speak two languages, English and German, and had a knowledge of Latin.  My paternal grandfather also could speak two languages, English and German, and had a knowledge of Latin.

My mother did not graduate from high school She was not given the opportunity to.  She earned an Associates as a an adult.  Her mother was university educated, as was her father.  They all spoke two languages, English and French, and had a command of Latin.

Growing up in my family household was like getting a post doctorate in some things, history and science in particular.  I read so early that I was on to adult books before I left grade school and had the odd experience of a junior high librarian not wishing to check a history book as she feared it was too advance.  I read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire before I left junior high.

I was in fact educated on a lot of stuff at home. . . but I was sent to school.

There's an interesting pattern here.  Some of my friends of my age had college educated parents, but not all of them did.  But all of my friends attended college or university.  Not all graduated, but they did receive some post high school education.  One of my closest friends had a father who did not graduate from high school.  He joined the Army in his senior year to fight in World War Two, following in the footsteps of a father who had fought in World War One.  My friend has two bachelors degrees.

And there's another thing here.  Even those people I knew from my generation, and the prior one, who had parents that didn't graduate high school, had quite literate parents.  If I ever went into a house that didn't have a lot of books somewhere, it was shocking.  I can only really recall one.  The home of my friend noted above was like a library.  My parents house  and that of all of my aunts and uncles were packed with books.  In my parents house you could find a few books that were in German or French.  A friend of mine who did not graduate from high school, but none the less went off to university, recalled his grandparents house being packed with books in . . . Gaelic.

My paternal grandmother absolutely insisted that my father go on to get an advanced degree, something he briefly though about not doing.  His unmarried sister near in age to him was sent to university as well.  I was given no real choice but to go on to higher education myself.  

And this was common for people my generation, and the preceding one.  Farm and ranch family in particular often had a manic dedication to higher education.

Home schooling has been around since time immemorial, I suppose, but when I was a kid, what it probably meant, where I live, is that the kid in question was living on a really remote ranch.  Even then, most ranching parents made a dedicated effort to avoid that.  More than a few had a teacher who lived at the ranch, paid for by the school district.  The county I live in had four rural remote public schools, of which only one is still in operation.  The neighboring one had some so remote that if you run across them on really rural roads its a shock.  The teachers at these institutions were admired in a way that's hard to describe.  Anything going on in the area always included them.

I didn't know a single homeschooled kid growing up.

Next to home schooling, of course, is private schooling.  When I was young the only private school I ever heard of was the Catholic school.  It was a big downtown school.  It's moved from downtown, but it still exists.  Catholic education had long been a thing in the US and apparently Catholics are supposed to send their kids to Catholic schools if they can, but I didn't go to it (it was full), nor did our kids.  

When in high school I learned that there was a Lutheran grade school, to my enormous surprise, as I walked by it every day.  After high school I learned that there was a "Christian" school, by which I mean a school attached to one of the sort of due it yourself evangelical Protestant groups.  It started in 1978, so I would have been in high school when it commenced operating.  The ministers for that church, at the time, were drawn from the congregation, and I later met one who was ironically adverse with its tenants as he was a geologist who accepted the truth of evolution, which the church did not.

A church that thinks evolution is a fib, probably doesn't have it taught in its schools.

Which is the point, really.  The goal of a large amount of modern homeschooling is to keep students as ignorant as possible, which is conceived of as limiting tehir "exposure" to corrupting elements.

I've been exposed to a few homeschooled kids over the years and frankly a lot of them were rather weird and very socially awkward.  Having said that, I've met one kid, and know of another, from a homeschooling family who were not that way, and one of which went on to a really high dollar career.

Now, with that comment, let me note that education isn't about getting rich, or shouldn't be.  It's about the Allegory of the Cave.  The problem here is that those exposed to  the sunlight are seeking to drag the ir offspring back into it, deeper in the cave, and into chains.

The simple fact of the matter is that Americans were much more literate prior to the 1990s than they are now.  They read.  They read even if they hadn't graduated high school.

And they read a lot, and a lot of it is much more advanced than what people claim to read now.  Even people who mostly read novels often read things much more advanced than people do now.  I recall one parent of a family friend being a fanatic fan of C. S. Forester, whose novels were just that, but noen the less dealt often with the Napoleonic Wars, something a lot of current Americans probably don't know occured.  One fellow I knew in the National Guard loved Louis Lamour, so much so that he read The Walking Drum, which is set in the Middle Ages, about which he was able to speak intelligently.  Another fellow, who had been a career Marine, was reading War and Peace.

Everyone read the newspaper.  You'd frequently see periodicals in people's houses, including unfortunately Playboy on occasion, but the latter had sufficiently good interviews that my high school newspaper teacher used those as examples and adopted them for the pattern of a series in that high school journal.  Less unfortunately, you'd see Time, Newsweek and Life in people's houses routinely.  And everyone read the local newspaper, by which I mean everyone.

The National Geographic seemed to be in the home of every household that had children, including ours.  Our collection went back into the 1940s, from my father's parents home.

Cartoons didn't make much of an appearance in our house, and I"ve never developed a taste for most of the cartoon journal type of cartoons, like Superman, but what I do recall is when they showed up, it was often Mad Magazine, which actually is really adult oriented, and not in the juvenile way "adult" is often used.

The point is, when people claim people were "more educated" in the past, including populists who are not today, they tended to be, but in ways that people now just don't really quite grasp.  They often had lower levels of educational achievement, but because they lived in a literate world, they were societally educated.

You can go into a lot of homes today and find that the occupants read. . . nothing.  

Instead, people consume only what suits them.  

In almost all of the 20th Century, it wasn't really possible to hear only the news you wanted to.  Even if you limited yourself to radio, prior to the introduction of television, you were going to get a wide range of news.  Newspapers were, as noted, almost a requirement for most households.  When television came in, at first, it was highly local but the news was national and there was no avoiding it.  You weren't going to get right or left wing propaganda from anyone.

That's all passed.

Americans aren't reading.  What media they consume is self reaffirming, like Protestant sermons from the 1600s.  People are listening only to like minds, and the nation is becoming more and more ignorant.

Which is why we have Donald Trump in office.  No literate nation would elect him to anything.\

Note that this doesn't mean the population is dumb.  Ignorant and dumb are not the same thing.  But we suffer from the Jo Jo Rabbit Effect in a major way.  We're listening, basically, to ourselves, and making excuses for our failures, and justifying our appetites.

And it puts the entire globe in danger.

Choices and the 2024 Election. An Observation.

It's a real oddity that in a nation which adores choices, we've chosen not to have very many in politics.

You can go to the grocery store and find an endless number of option for bottled water, and I don't mean the mineral waters from far off regions.  Just regular old water.  Water comes right to the house at a cheaper rate through the municipal water system, but people still buy it contained in plastic bottles from the store.

And yet we have only two political parties we choose to take seriously, no matter how much they've failed us, and are failing us.

Not only that, we seriously listen to those who argue we must not consider any other options.

Indeed, it's sort of an interesting example of the Adam Sandler Effect.  That is, everyone agreeing to something because everyone else seems to agree that we should agree with it, combined with the Jo Jo Rabbit Effect of only hearing those right around us.

Everyone has had the experience of something being heralded in a locality with no real reason.  "It's great", they all say, even though it isn't.  

American politics right now in that sense, are like two restaurants in the same small town strip mall.  They're competing against each other fiercely, and even have their adherents, but frankly neither is very good.  Basically, you can go into one and have the crap sandwich on white bread, or the other the sh** sandwich on rye.  Out in the parking lot, however, there are food trucks with different menus.

Both restaurants agree you shouldn't go to the food trucks.

Well, if you live in a state where one of the two restaurants seems to be permanently closed for renovation, you can definitely go to one of the food trucks.

The Stammtisch and Social Isolation.

It occurs to me that I'm lucky.  

I come from people who widely circulated, very well educated in history, and I have some close friends about whom I can say the same.  Some of them I meet mostly on line anymore, but I've met all of them in person and have engaged them all in lively conversations.  They includes geologists, geophysicists, businessmen, computer experts and infrastructure workers, who are self employed, industry employed, and government employed.  And it includes Catholics, Baptists, Calvinists and non denominational Protestants.

A sort of Stammtisch, if you will.

My Stammtisch is centered on horses and history.  Arguably, a second one centers on the outdoors and certain rarified sports.  That's not the point, however.  It's that I have them.  One, the one referenced above, is made up of Americans for the most part, although there are some people who stop by who are not.  The second one includes Americans, Central Americans, and Europeans.

At one time most Americans had that.

Now they don't.

And that explains a lot of the mess we're in right now, and what's going on right now.

One of the ways modern life really leaves us short is that we only associate, by and large, with our own kind.  Depending upon your station in life, that's more true for some than for others, but it's pretty true.

This has always been the case to a fair degree, but not as much as it is now.  Indeed, it's been the subject of entire books, Bowling Alone perhaps being the most notable.  Since the advent of television, followed by electronic media, we get up, we go to work and we come home.  With the enforced decline of family life caused by the Sexual Revolution and things that followed in its wake, that means that a lot of people really live that life exactly. They're not married, they have no family, they just come and go.

Friends have been substituted for "electronic communities" of the like minded.  People avoid and eschew settings where they mix with the unfamiliar.  For people who retain a faith, they often choose a congregation of the like minded.  For those interested in. . . well anything, they do the same.

This is incredibly dangerous as it means that ideas are never challenged in any setting.  Nobody really advances their ideas, or ever defends them.

This has become increasingly obvious to me over the last couple of weeks, in part because I'm finding I'm an exception not the rule.  I mix with people of other views a lot, and I have some very intelligent and thoughtful friends who hold a lot of my views. . . and a lot of views I don't hold.  

Elks Club annual outing, September 13, 1916.

On the danger first.

I'm a lawyer by training and trade.  The law is an intellectual field based in inquiry at its best, although the profession shows a lot of the worst anymore.  Be that as it may, I have tended to find that most really thoughtful active lawyers are appalled by recent events, irrespective of their political views. This view isn't universal, but it's quite widespread.  Being analytical by nature, and having had that reinforced by training, knowing the law in general, and knowing that developments in the law are constant and that it does not remain fixed in technology, it's overwhelmingly the case in the law that recent events regarding the election have been a horror to lawyers.

Lawyers by and large give no credit whatsoever to the claims that the election was stolen.  The facts simply aren't there.  Given that, it's been extraordinarily difficult for those in the law to grasp how anyone could possibly believe the opposite.  

Indeed, in one rare instance that I personally encountered the person's belief in the opposite was based on a faith in lawyers themselves, combined with a dose of Fox News, that most lawyers don't credit.  There were legal challenges in court, was their view, and therefore there must be merit.  That's charming, and it shows a faith in the nature of litigation that is based on the way it is supposed to work, but litigators certainly don't look at litigation that way.  Must have merit?  Lots of lawsuits are filed that have no merit whatsoever, and even less than that. We all know that.

Knights of Columbus group, 1914.

But what about everyone else?

Part of the problem here is what I've noted above.  People are in limited circles and they hear only what others in the same circles believe, and they have faith in certain social constructs that don't really deserve it.  If a lawyer can believe that merely filing suit indicates merit, regular people must surely believe that.  And lawyers know that.  Lots of suits are filed merely because they create a belief in potential jurors and the public that there must be a problem, thereby providing an incentive to the defendants to settle.  The law states that its always presumed that the plaintiff has the burden of proof on things, but regular people tend to look at it the other way around. The accused, they feel, must prove their free of guilt, not rely on the other side to prove their guilt.

Added to that, lawyers are highly adapted to things moving even when the law does not.  That's played a role here.  We as a society tend to believe we adapt well to technological changes, but we do a lot less than we imagine.  During the recent election voting by mail has been a big deal, and of course the Administration made it a big deal.  It made it a big deal in my belief is that its long been the case that Democrats often fail to go to the polls. The Administration's thought was, it seems to me, that if voting wasn't done widely by mail, it just wouldn't be widely done.

Sixteenth Head Camp, Modern Woodsmen of America, Buffalo, New York.  1911.

That turned into the outrage over what seemed to be the case that Democrats voted by mail and Republicans did not. That's not really completely true by any means, but there's an element of truth to it.  That's not surprising, however, as Democrats sizably outnumber Republicans in the country and voting by mail is easy.  Added to that, the Administration repeatedly condemned voting by mail and people who were highly loyal to the Administration naturally concluded that lots of mail in ballots would be lost, thrown away, or whatever, and therefore they should not vote by mail.  If you tell your loyal adherents not to trust the mail, they won't trust the mail.  If you tell everyone that the mail is not to be trusted, and lost of those people don't trust you, they'll use the mail.

Beyond that, Democrats, irrespective of the jokes about the Democratic Party not being "an organized party", are really good at organization. Republicans, with a strong ethos of independence, not so much.  That Democrats could exploit mail in voting through organization isn't surprising, but it isn't evil either.  It's strategic.

Mail in voting isn't new and again, to lawyers, its not even a big deal.  The thought that it is to others pretty much completely escapes us, as is now evident to me.  We have served pleadings by mail for eternity.  We were early adopters of things electronic.  Those from Western states, where mail in balloting has been around forever, already live in a world where people vote by mail.  We know that mail in voting can be trusted and frankly this is simply a natural evolution, in our view, in the process. Absolutely no big deal.

Apparently it is a big deal, however, in those camps where this was never thought of before and was really appreciated for the first time.  Victor David Hanson has an article expressing absolute horror that we've now arrived at a point where the American tradition is no longer "we all go to the polls on election day".  That tradition hasn't existed for decades, and indeed the American tragedy in elections was that most Americans didn't vote at all.  Cynically some Republicans opposed mail in voting for that very reason, often camouflaging it with concerns over the mail in process, but the real concern is that mail in voting is really easy, particularly if you live in a region where somebody has been proactive in sending you a ballot. Fill it out, and mail it back.  But if that's the case, most of those votes are going to be Democratic, by far.

Indeed, by a huge margin.

Which shows how well the GOP really did. The Republicans should have drowned in a year of mail in balloting. They didn't.

Anyhow, getting back to the circle of friends argument, it's now struck me how this has impacted the argument, by showing me how my thoughtful friends in the other camp view it.  But not to them quite yet.

Taking all we have above and processing it down for most people, what we have is this.  Most people don't listen to Meet The Press and This Week, check the headlines from The New York Times and the Washington Post, and read their local paper.  Not anymore.  Most people think they're informed if they watch a news channel. Television news has always been incredibly superficial, but even doing that people should have a good idea of what's been going on.

But most people who claim they watch a news channel are like people who claim they only have a beer on weekends. The weekend drinkers, with exceptions of all kids they make for themselves, extend the weekend to start on Wednesday and run through to Tuesday. We all know that this is true as we all do something like that ourselves.  People who claim "I watch CNN and Fox News", as if that were to actually make them informed, are actually watching only one, and only superficially.

Which means that people get armed with a narrow set of tailored facts, go to work with their fellows who are likely in the same station of life as they are, here the same views, and are never exposed to any others.

If, therefore, you work with people who believe that mail in balloting is really weird and will be full of illegitimacy, and its a plot, and everyone you know believes what you do, you'll believe that the election must have been stolen.

Indeed, in Wyoming, I've heard people say "that many people can't have voted for Biden". That's because in Wyoming in 2021 everyone in certain occupations supports only Trump.  Unbeknownst to them, there are entire occupations in the state where nobody will admit to every having supported Trump, they just keep their mouths shut.  What happens is that people are talking only to themselves, and reinforcing their own views.

I'll give an example of that.

I know a fellow who is a well educated very intelligent person, but who has no interest in politics and very little interest, if any at all, in history.  Mostly, he's interested in his family and religion, both of which are fine and admirable interests.  He's interested in his work.  

On a day to day basis he's mostly around his family.   An old fashioned Mid Westerner, he's highly gregarious, but his close friends are mostly drawn from his church.  He has work friends, and he likes to talk to them, but in a Mid Westerners sort of way.  When real Westerners talk, there's always a real element of seriousness to it. . . always.  Westerners don't really have casual conversations. . . not really.

This fellow's friends are all, as noted, from his church, one way or another. Which is fine.. . or actually not. They include a couple of politicians from the GOP.  Both of those politicians are hard line Trumpites.

So what, you may ask.  Well, it's simple enough, and it shows why Rod Dreher's acolytes don't understand him.

Another example that shows why.

I heard an interview at the start of the  Syrian civil war of a woman who had endured the earlier rebellion by Shia militiamen.  She noted, at that time, she was surprised to discovery, during the rebellion, that Syria wasn't a Christian country.  Her town was Maronite Catholic. . . she assumed everyone in Syria was because everyone she knew was.

Back to my friend.  He's exposed to one view, and the only political views he's been exposed to are from the hard Trump right.  He came into this assuming the election must have been stolen. And why wouldn't he believe that?  That was the only view, and therefore the majority view, of what he was hearing.  And people generally believe the majority view.

We could call it the Jo Jo Rabbit Effect.  For those who haven't seen the movie, it's well worth watching and a really eclectic comedy.  Set in the last days of Nazi Germany, the young German protagonist discovers that Jews aren't bad and that he's falling in love with the young Jewish woman his mother has been hiding.  I note it here, however, as the stories his fellows tell about Jews are bizarre, enough so that a German officer clearly doesn't believe them, but most people are have fallen for them.  It's the only news they're getting.

It's the same with my friend. His two politician friends, one of whom may simply in my view be adopting his positions for purely cynical self serving reasons, and the other who probably has adopted them simply because he's also only around his family and nobody else, have informed him the election is stolen.  Its the majority view where he is.  He's shocked to learn that other people think otherwise, and actually really shaken up about it.

Lets' contrast that a bit with how things used to be.  I'll go way back. . . to 1933 or 34.

33 or 34 is when my father started school as a four year old in Denver.  The first grade school he went to was a Catholic school in downtown urban Denver.  Suffice to say, a Catholic school, in urban Denver, even in the 1930s, was going to feature a really mixed set of ethnicities.  

When he was 7, his family moved to Scottsbluff and he was enrolled thereafter in public school.  I don't know if Scottsbluff had a Catholic school in the 1930s, but I do know that while Catholics weren't uncommon in western Nebraska by any means whatsoever, they were still a minority population.  He went to school with a lot of Hispanic kids (universally called "Mexicans" then, and while I was in school) and Indian kids as well.  When he moved to Wyoming and went to the only high school in town it contained kids from all walks of life and every local ethnicity.  He played football with one fellow that I later knew well whose first and middle names were "Robert Lee", named for Robert E. Lee, but who was black. They later worked together for a time at the Post Office and they remained lifelong friends.  My father left the Post Office, however, to go to university and then entered the Air Force.  Overseas his two closest, and lifelong, friends were two fellow officers, one of whom was black, and another who was Jewish.  My father, of course, was half German, half Irish, and Catholic.

Let's go to me then.  I went to grade school in Central Wyoming where Catholics aren't uncommon, but area also a minority.  Of the other two Catholic kids in my grade school class (there wasn't room in the Catholic grade school at the time) one was of Irish extraction and the other was "Mexican".  I went all the way through grade school with one kid who was Jehovah's Witness.  My closest friend in grade school was Baptist.  A good friend was Mormon.  

All schools in the county were by geographic district.  The districts were purely geographic, however, and therefore they mixed economics pretty well.  One kid's father was an ornamental iron worker.  Two kids had fathers who were lawyers.  One kid had a medically retired fireman for a father, and his mother, uniquely at that time, was the prime bread winner. She was a secretary (which my own mother occasionally was).  One kid had older parents who were already retired.  

In Junior High the mix increased with new elements.  The junior high I went to included the entire northern part of the city which was across the interstate highway and the railroad, the only solidly poorer part of town.  All those kids went to the same junior high.  The populations of Hispanic kids increased and almost all of the black kids went to the same junior high.  Most of us went on to the same high school.

After high school I went on to university, and also on to the National Guard.  My Army basic training and advanced training battery included men from the South and West and a large number of Hispanic men and African Americans.  My best friends in basic training were one young man whose had been raised by his grandparents and another who was married to a community college professor.  

At the University of Wyoming, this story continues.  Most of the students I knew at UW were white, as most university students were, but in the geology department there was one student who was a Turkish American.  My best friends in university included a lifelong friend who is a dedicated Baptist, another who is Lutheran, one who was a fallen away (and now reverted) Catholic, and one who was a non observant Protestant.  In college and university I dated a girl for awhile who was from the South, another who was from Central Wyoming, one from the town where I was born and raised and still live, and one who was Chinese Dutch (as in ethnically Chinese, but born in the Netherlands and a Dutch citizen).

That sort of experience is really broadening.  Theodore Roosevelt's biographer Edmond Morris maintained that Roosevelt would not have become President without having been a rancher in North Dakota.  It was there that he learned to speak to average people and to see their point of view and appreciate their intelligence.  Without that, he would have probably never risen above being a politician in New York.  

And as radical as it may sound, Hitler would not have become what he became if he'd stayed in Vienna, one of the most polyglot international cities in Europe in the early 20th Century.  Indeed, prior to World War One he's known to have at least one Jewish friend.  It was the isolation, both physical and intellectual, of German army life that allowed him to develop into the monster he became.

We like to think, for some reason, of the march of technology being every beneficial.  It isn't.  We've isolated ourselves from the natural world, an exposure to which is necessary in order for humans to really be humans, and we've isolated ourselves from ourselves.  Now, the Woke, with their absurd anti natural theories on human nature, aren't exposed to any humans save for those who agree with their absurdities. Those in the far political right, generally associate only with the like minded.  Qanon's (probably Russian backed) conspiracy theories sound absolutely absurd to anyone who isn't in the mix of them, but those who are tend to associate only with those who are.

And then add to that COVID 19.

COVID 19 accelerated the process of social isolation like nothing else. We were basically headed in that direction anyhow, as employers were steadily moving towards shifting things out of offices and into "homes".  The launched the process like an aircraft with JATO bottles.

Up, up and away. . . 

Or, rather, out, out and at "home", with that home probably being an apartment.

When the pandemic started some mused that it might serve to arrest a societal fall.  We had a long post on that which dealt with some of those views ourselves.  And maybe it will, but right now the evidence isn't great.

But for the Sexual Revolution and the absurdity of Wokeness, being sent home would have meant something a lot different than it tends to now.  Sure, not everything would have been great for everyone and the entire post 1950s view of the 1950s which tends to come up in such conversations never ever existed.  Probably part of what would have happened is that some guys who left their work to drink at he bar before coming home drunk to fall asleep at the dinner table would stay home, take to drinking and beat up his wife and kids.

But by and large they wouldn't have.

Now, part of that same generation isn't married and is having trouble getting married to start with, sucked into a hookup culture that was emotionally shallow in the extreme and which reduced human relations to the animal level. Stuck at home, they're taking to all sorts of vices as they don't know where else to go to satiate them. Booze, drugs pornography, you name it.  The sale of alcohol is way up.  Drug overdoses are way up.  Apparently visits to something called "Pornhub" are likewise way up.  Probably visits to Catholic Answers and Orthodox Christianity are as well, but they have to depend on donations and not pay pre view for addicted vices or soon to be addicted vices.

And some of those people, now really separated from the world, are going down some dark alleys.  Whereas in earlier extremely stressed time, the same people would have still had to go to work, and would have walked from their work to the train past some people arguing for extremism, but also past the Salvation Army seeking donations, Hasidic jewelers wearing their prayer shawls, and the two guys on the trains arguing the merits or demerits of the New York Yankees.  For some of those people now there are no interruptions, no matter how badly they may be wanted, and its an easy diversion to see what people you sort of favor politically are up to.  Pretty soon, you are deep into a conspiracy theory populated by people who really truly believe in it.

That wouldn't happen if the same people had a Stammtisch.

Most folks don't have, a Stammtisch such as I'm fortunate to have.

Well, what of this? 

I'm frankly not sure.  During much of human history this was the norm for most people actually.  If you were a Russian peasant, you know only Russian peasants, and so on.  

But most of them didn't live in a modern state like we do, and face the problems we face.  We're incredibly polarized in a way that we haven't been for a very long time, and have real problems to address.  Some of our conflicts are truly at an existential nature.  

I don't know how to cause people to have a Stammtisch.  Much of that culture is broken.  

And that's much of the problem.