They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory, but they do have experience dealing with the government. They've seen how broken their local public schools, VA care, and Medicare are. They've been overwhelmed and overborne by the complicated rules of government programs, and faced harsh penalties for slight missteps.
They also know that Democratic programs generally exclude them because by working for slightly more than minimum wage they earn too much to qualify. And they usually know people receiving government benefits, and they see the lifestyle these benefits impose, and they don't want that for themselves.
Yet there are traditions both within working-class leftism and working-class libertarianism that emphasise that what you call the "abstract theory" is key to activism and informed participation in the democratic process. After all, the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of writings that goes back centuries. Thus, as I said, in the past political thinkers have urged the working class to read, read, read, and not just go off their anecdotal experiences of interaction with government and society or their gut feelings.
Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Abstract theory often leads people astray.
I think the working class might be wise to ignore those arguments in favor of their own experiences.
We've seen what the government is actually doing, and theory doesn't match reality. Those who advocate more government intervention should first improve those government interventions that already exist, so government programs can serve as an advertisement for their ideas, instead of a warning.
Or the arguments for American democracy and the nascent European democracies, whose founding fathers advocated for such systems by citing literature from Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment. The 19th century saw a wave of low-cost, mass-market editions of the classical canon precisely because it was thought that democracy required an educated citizenry.
Or modern libertarianism, which points to many of the same sources but adds more recent thinkers like Hayek or von Mises.
With your third paragraph, you seem to be suggesting that I favour government invention, but I have made no such suggestion in my posts. Rather, as I said, the need to be informed and aware of the tradition of political argument holds regardless of where a person might be situated ideologically, whether on the "left" or "right".
> Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to?
But politics is not mathematics. Political ideas should be judged by their outcomes, not their theoretical validity. And everyone gets a vote about whether those outcomes are good.
With voting based merely on a gut feeling, a politician’s charisma, or the candidate’s party affiliation, one may well have to wait until the next election cycle to express one’s feelings about whether the outcome was good or not, and try all over again. But an informed voting public has a better chance of getting the outcomes they want the first time around. There has always been that expectation in American democracy and some of its analogues elsewhere that the populace, beyond merely having the right to vote for its representatives, would be keenly self-educating. If a voter fails to live up to the ideals which were considered crucial for democracy to run smoothly, then I think it is fair to question the legitimacy of their views.
Also, simple, straightforward voting is not the only action or mechanism for “outcomes” in modern democratic states. There are things like strikes, tactical voting, lobbying, resorting to legal action, etc. (Radicals on either end of the political spectrum would add uprisings, too.) It is the political literature of the past that lays out all these options for the citizenry, explains the pros or cons, and lets them make an informed decision on how to better their lot.
A bold assertion that you should provide evidence for. I'd argue that, in practice, things rarely happen the way political theory predicts. Politics is not physics, either.
The average American watches three hours of TV a day. People have plenty of free time. If they’re not interested their political opinions are irrelevant, politics will happen to them, not with them.
Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to? The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest may be unable to acquire more information than is conveniently delivered to them through a handful of sources, and if those sources are controlled by certain actors and not balanced by other sources, then that would appear to place a limitation on how informed their views might be.
Some influential 19th-century traditions of working-class radicalism heavily emphasized learning for the sake of it, but I am not sure that conditions today are conducive to that.