Oh boy, I couldn't agree more... I, too, feel rage at this state of things. What makes it particularly awful is I just don't see any way out of it.

People are pathetically easy to manipulate for the most part. The poor are the demographic that most frequently votes against their interests. The fascinating part is, it would be easy to conclude that perhaps these people are simply not very clever. Well, that's certainly true for some fraction of them, to some extent... but I really don't think that this is the main factor (or even in the top 3), no - rather, I just think that it's a combination of their being credulous, and not particularly predisposed toward a special type of socially-strategic thinking. Like, the sort of thinking that manipulating psychopaths use to bend people to their will. Like you said, the poor are often plenty clever and useful, they often just get manipulated and used.

What I don't know is whether this is just a matter of education (and so long-term improvement is viable) or whether it's more of a societal-cultural values thing... or even, I guess, a biological thing (there is probably at least _some_ component of this but probably very minor relative to the others).

I'd want education to include a kind of mental self-defence component, so people can protect themselves against mental infiltration by virulent memes (eg, religions and other ideas which abhor and resist attempts of inspection and eradication) and demagoguery... as well as a heavy focus on critical thinking in general. Learning _how_ to think - not_what_ to think.

"that most frequently votes against their interests"

This itself is a meme. Shouldn't we sometimes vote against what's technically in our own narrow interests in favor of what's in everyone's interests or that of future generations?