> there exists a subset of the population that cannot and will not be educated or have the ability to reason on a certain level to make things work.
I have absolutely no evidence to support this (but I would welcome any for or against it), but I have a loose theory that there is pretty much always a subset of people who are physiologically predisposed to be driven by a fear response more than the average person, and over time they congregate, possibly as a safety mechanism.
This is pretty much the premise of Bob Altemeyer's work: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Altemeyer His book The Authoritarians is the one that most elaborates on it, so works that cite or respond to it would probably be exactly what you're looking for.
I have absolutely no evidence to support this (but I would welcome any for or against it), but I have a loose theory that there is pretty much always a subset of people who are physiologically predisposed to be driven by a fear response more than the average person, and over time they congregate, possibly as a safety mechanism.