Ask HN: How do we solve rising anti-intellectualism?

The US election unfolded much the same way as Brexit did in the UK. Campaigns based on outright lies and misinformation swayed a voting population to cast ballots essentially against their own interests. To pick two choice statistics: North Wales, which has some of the highest poverty rates in Europe and has received billions in funding from the EU voted to leave. 52% of women in the US general election voted for an essentially out-and-proud misogynist. While the majority electorate in both countries is clearly hard-up, with the benefits of globalisation are not being distributed fairly, this disenfranchisement has been capitalised upon not by politicians offering real solutions, but by demagogues appealing to xenophobia and hate. At the root of all of this is an undercurrent of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism that has been whipped up by the campaigns. The elites are the ones who screwed over the system, the intellectuals disconnected from the reality. While there's a grain of truth in this, people like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage have not turned their countries' fortunes for the better, by any reasonable metric, and both of them hail from exactly this class in the first place. The sad reality is that almost everyone is under pressure, but some people don't have the capacity to reason about the real reasons as to why that might be, and can be led down a path of hatred. Armed with a time machine, we might turn back the clock - invest more in education, regulations around campaigns, and measures to spread profits more evenly. I don't know. But we're in the situation where we have an electorate that is disturbingly disconnected from factual reality, unable to make rational decisions about what's in their best interests, which is a very dangerous situation for a country (let alone a global superpower) to be in. We can't just give up though, is there something that we, our friends and networks can do to try and reverse this trend?