In terms of formal education, sure, they stopped at eighth grade. On the other hand, they were absolutely reading books, newspapers, magazines, and so on.

This is an assertion, not a fact. More than that, it's an assertion held tightly by liberals with no attempt to ground it in anything. Have you ever looked into it? I have. Lemme show you some stuff.

I'ma start with the common knowledge of the "TED Talks Era:"

I don't know how many bajillions of views that turkey had when it was new. I was one of them. There was no attribution to it anywhere - "what the hell is a Shift Happens?" Turns out it's an August 2006 IT powerpoint for Arapahoe High School from the math teacher to everyone else, basically saying "wake up it's the Internet." A noble goal, a stellar effort, and given the intended audience it's not surprising that it contains howlers like this one:

Estimated by whom? Using what methods? Compared to where in the 18th century? Which, by the way, covers everything from the seed drill through the electric battery. Yet it became a part of the common knowledge - much like it was common knowledge in Korea that sleeping with a fan could kill you, at least until the English language Internet found out about this and started mocking Koreans mercilessly.

So how do you measure "absolutely reading books, newspapers, magazines, and so on?" if you go out on your own and try and find that information you'll discover that the information you can find goes back to 2017 or so. You'll also find a lot of nonsense, like the declining relevance of GoodReads as a false proxy for literacy and the wildly-speculative impact of the printing press. FRED has actual data going back to 1990 which, if we're being honest, is just as likely to be measuring the impact of Harry Potter as it is anything else.

What has gone up gangbusters is literacy, particularly among minorities, and this is not just an American thing. What that tells you is it was the intelligentsia who were reading the Leatherstocking Tales, not the sharecroppers. "Books, newspapers, magazines and so on" presumes a few things that shouldn't be presumed but most of them loop back to the misconception that "if it's in print it's good" to which I refer you back to my buddy The Protocols.

Some anecdata: I used to be ashamed of my paternal grandparents for not going to high school, primarily because my maternal grandparents were kicked out of Harvard and Radcliffe respectively in their last semester (it's a long story). This was before I learned that nobody back then went to high school where I grew up. My maternal grandmother got married at fourteen and popped out two kids before her eighteenth birthday but you know what? She read maybe a dozen Harlequin romances a day. The Harvard crew didn't read shit. So what are we reading, exactly, and why are we using that as a proxy for knowledge? Some more anecdata: I got a buddy who consumes podcasts all day. He can barely read a word because his dyslexia is so severe - IF: between 5% and 20% of Americans have some severity of dyslexia AND: modern technology permits the consumption of information without having to read THEN: is literacy really that great of a proxy for learning and knowledge? And I mean, we haven't even touched on yellow journalism yet. Is watching Fox News better than watching nothing at all? What about reading the New York World?

Conservatism comes from the belief that "things were better before." It's a philosophy of nostalgia. it ignores the simple fact that our memories and our heritage aren't neutral, and it ignores the simple fact that our memories and heritage are endlessly rewritten to support our worldviews of the present. "People are stupider now" helps us make sense of Trump voters, but only if we didn't grow up with Reagan voters. The fact of the matter is, American history is gnarly and, for people who weren't white and male, sucked a lot of the time. This country voted the way it did because nobody feels secure in their jobs, and nobody feels secure in their jobs because the Long Boom is over.