By almost every indicator, Americans fare poorly in literacy — defined as competence or knowledge in a specified area, whether measured by linguistic, scientific, historic, economic, geographic, or legal aptitude. We have become a ‘sound-bite’ culture . As a consequence, many Americans cannot distinguish between a fact and an opinion or distinguish myth from reality.
On an individual level, many lack basic skills in reading, writing, and comprehension to use language to communicate effectively or coherently. Few can read a newspaper such as The New York Times with good comprehension; fewer still read any newspapers or books at all. Ungrammatical, vulgar, and vernacular expressions are commonplace, and reliance upon often unverified and false information conveyed by social media has exploded. Even across the class divides, one detects a decline in literacy .
That decline among large segments of the American population has been widely documented, quantified, and continues to be chronicled. According to a 2020 study from the Department of Education, approximately half of U.S. adults aged sixteen to seventy-four years old — 54% or 130 million people — lack literacy proficiency.
Former congressman Newt Gingrich understood better than most that the selective and careful use of words could shape a cultural, political, or economic narrative. The misuse of words impairs our ability to reason and to understand social reality. Without attention to the meaning of words and the manner in which words are expressed, our thoughts become unfocused, and our ability to distinguish between that which is true and that which is untrue becomes untethered.
Deliberately misleading words and phrases are the essence of successful propaganda . During the past six decades, the words ‘liberal’, ‘government’, and a panoply of related synonyms such as ‘tax and spend’, ‘death tax’, and ‘government mandates’ have been repeatedly employed by right-wing politicians and media outlets to convey something sinister, while slogans such as ‘free enterprise ’, ‘individual rights’ and the ‘American way’ have been invoked to convey something wonderful and patriotic.
The link between language and thought is explored in George Orwell’s profound novel, 1984. In that seminal book, the central character, Winston Smith, works in the Ministry of Truth. His job is to help to create for the omnipresent tyranny which governs Oceana a new language, Newspeak. Newspeak is the ultimate language of control: Each year in the Ministry of Truth, thousands of words are eliminated. In addition, antonyms are collapsed into synonyms. Hence, “Freedom is slavery, “Ignorance is strength, “War is peace.”
When language is used imprecisely — or to try to create, through deliberate misinformation, an ‘alternative reality’ — the underlying quality of thought is similarly compromised. As Orwell reminds us in the appendix to that novel, when one loses the capacity to use words correctly, one loses the capacity to think; when one loses the capacity to think, the ability to rebel or to imagine alternatives to the status quo is irrevocably extinguished.
The calculated use of emotionally charged words by Gingrich and other right-wing opportunists has been to inure citizens to the roll-back of government regulations and programs that promote and protect the public interest and to stymie efforts to regulate heretofore unregulated entities such as monopolies , hedge funds, and financial instruments such as collateralized securities. The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has transformed American politics into something akin to a Moroccan bazaar controlled by the highest bidders and the wealthiest donors who have largely succeeded in controlling the public’s understanding of the narrative and in defining policy priorities.
Natalie Jackson , a research director for PRRI , explained during a 2021 expert panel discussion that “Among Republicans, news consumption really matters.” Jackson emphasized that “There is a reasonably strong association between QAnon theory beliefs and vaccine hesitancy and refusal.” She also expressed her befuddlement about hardcore vaccine rejecters: “They have a set of attitudes toward the virus that is quite different from the rest of the country. They overwhelmingly feel like the seriousness of the pandemic has been exaggerated in the news… They’re less likely to say they wear masks when they go out in public.” The consequence of this profoundly anti-social behavior was the continuing spread of the Covid-19 virus and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary and preventable deaths.”
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who reported Jackson’s comments, added, “Rather than addressing real threats to their lives, these communities generate fear of racial replacement, resentment toward elites, and the belief they are facing religious discrimination.” But alternative theories of victimization, no matter how fervently espoused, are no substitute for reality. According to Rubin, Bloomberg reported: “In Missouri, Arkansas, and Utah, the seven-day average of hospital admissions with confirmed Covid-19 has increased more than 30% in the past two weeks… In Mississippi, the hospitalization rate is up 5% in the period. This means more hospitalizations — which Bloomberg notes is ‘particularly jarring among 18 to 29-year-olds in the outlier states’ — and ultimately more.”
Shoshana Zuboff , Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School , has urged the United States and other market-based economies to address the issue of how knowledge is validated and disseminated. “In an information civilization , societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution, and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides? Who knows? Who decides who decides who knows?”
She fears that we are on the verge of an epistemic coup . “The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages. The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.”
The second stage, she observes, “Is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality , defined as the difference between what I know and what can be known about me.”
She contends that we have now become enveloped in a third stage that “Introduces epistemic chaos caused by profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination, and micro-targeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation . Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics, and sometimes instigate violence and death.”
Ultimately, Professor Zuboff predicts that if increasing ownership and privatization of knowledge by monopolistic conglomerates such as Apple and Google are not curbed by governments, we will become collectively imprisoned in a fourth stage where “Epistemic dominance is institutionalized overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital . The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital .”
Because so many Americans are unable to describe with any kind of precision scientific, economic, or political concepts, the range of discourse and the limits of what it is possible for us to achieve collectively — as a society — have become pathologically narrowed. At the same time, what is accepted in popular culture protects the status quo on behalf of the 1% while impoverishing the rest of us. The relentless repetition of hysterical arguments that continually warn of government overreach have made us oblivious to the plight of so many of our neighbors and has anesthetized our ability to empathize.
The consequences are well-documented. Illiteracy creates a docile and easily manipulated public. At the political level, the inability to understand and to use language properly has created a vacuum into which slogans and cant have become substitutes for serious public discussion or analysis of issues. Hence, baseless claims made by former President Trump about a stolen election continue to pollute discourse in the public square because of the inability of millions of his supporters to distinguish the difference between proven facts and baseless propaganda.
The decline in knowledge about the U.S. government among Americans has created an electorate that is unable to make informed political decisions. The U.S. Department of Education, CNN, C-Span, the Annenberg Center for Public Policy, and The New York Times, among numerous other media outlets show that only 43 percent likely U.S. voters can name even one Supreme Court justice. 53 percent of Americans polled incorrectly think it is accurate to say that immigrants who are not present in the U.S. legally do not have any rights under the U.S. Constitution ; more than a third of those surveyed can’t name any of the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment ; only a quarter of adult Americans can name all three branches of government.
Other research documents pervasive political illiteracy . Haven Insights , a Washington DC-based survey market research firm, reports that, although only 37 percent of Americans could name their representative in Congress, 65 percent still believed that their representative was overpaid; only two-thirds of Americans who voted in the 2016 presidential election understood that they also had the opportunity to elect a U.S. representative in the same election when they voted; self-described conservatives were more likely than liberals or moderates to know their representative’s name or party affiliation; self-described liberals were more likely than conservatives or moderates to have voted ‘blind’ in this manner.
Ignorance about political affairs is not the province of only those with little education or few credentials. Jonathan Cole reported in the Atlantic in 2009 that “89 percent of those who took a test on civic knowledge expressed confidence they could pass it; but, in fact, 83 percent would have failed.” Cole opined that “The public’s limited knowledge — or even what the psychologist William James called ‘acquaintance with knowledge ’ — is neither monopolized by the poorly educated nor found only among certain social classes. This illiteracy has created a void that is easily filled by those with anti-science, anti-intellectual, and demagogic leanings.”
At least part of the explanation for the decline in political literacy may be traced to the ubiquitous reliance by millions of Americans upon social media — e.g., Facebook, Twitter , Reddit , TikTok , etc. — as their primary sources of news and information at a time when those platforms have become instruments of disinformation , baseless propaganda, and shameless lies increasingly.
Samantha Bradshaw and Philip Howard of Oxford University published a study in 2018 that described the political abuse of social media platforms in forty-eight countries. They concluded that in each of the cases they cited, the use of tools like fake news and trolling undermined the health of democratic governments and benefitted authoritarian leaders. “There is mounting evidence that social media are being used to manipulate and deceive the voting public — and to undermine democracies and degrade public life,” they wrote. “Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike.
There is little doubt that, besides the disinformation spread by domestic right-wing zealots and conspiracy theorists, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian agencies, disguised through their bots , have contributed to the proliferation of fake news. Their goal is to destabilize the U.S. and other Western democracies and to hasten the emergence of illiberal democracies. Witness the report by The New York Times published in September of 2021 that described a series of meetings in the spring of 2019 between a senior adviser to the self-exiled former Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont , and Russian officials, former intelligence officers, and the well-connected grandson of a K.G.B. spymaster.
At least a part of the explanation for widespread political illiteracy may be traced to a decline in required courses at the secondary school level in history, government, economics, and what used to be called civics or civic education. In 2010, the program on American citizenship reviewed a database that was collected from over 1,000 randomly selected high school social studies teachers. It found that a majority considered teaching key facts, dates, and major events related to citizenship their lowest priority. Only 38 percent of those surveyed stated that “The key principles of American government” were or ought to be the top priority of what a civic teacher taught. In addition, 70% percent of the teachers believed that social studies classes were a low priority in schools because of increased pressure for schools to show progress on statewide mathematics and language arts tests.
Political illiteracy is a problem at the post-secondary school level, too. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) conducted a survey of colleges in 2015. The survey found that more than 80% of seniors at 55 top-ranked colleges and universities would have received a D or an F. Among the survey’s startling findings: barely under 60% of the students polled knew that the U.S. Constitution established a division of powers between the states and the federal government; almost 62% could not identify the correct length of congressional terms; 39% did not know Franklin Roosevelt was the president during World War II; one-third of those college graduates could not identify the Bill of Rights as a name given to a first ten constitutional amendments; and 32% believed Representative John Boehner of Ohio, the former Speaker of the House, was the current president of the U.S.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) concluded: “Despite the boasts of college catalogs, few of their curricula will help prepare students to be informed and engaged citizens. This year’s survey showed that little more than 18% of our colleges and universities require even a single foundational course in the U.S. government or history. Rather than learning about the foundations of their country, students are allowed to fulfill requirements with courses such as ‘History of Rock’ or ‘Horror Films and American Culture’. Citing ACTA’s earlier surveys, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni pointedly observed that “The profound and widespread ignorance about federal processes has been a major impediment to effective governance.”
Concerns expressed by scholars about ‘low-information’ voters and civic illiteracy were vindicated with the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and explain, in large part, his continuing support. Trump enjoyed significant success in his efforts to convert the pervasive threat that illiteracy poses to our democratic institutions into a political asset. With demagogic appeals to the worst instincts of ‘consciously unconscious’ Americans, he successfully shored up his political base. In February 2016, at the Nevada GOP caucus, he exclaimed, “I love the poorly educated.”
In 2019, Dana Milbank, a Washington Post columnist, wrote an article entitled ‘We are a deeply stupid nation’. Milbank reminded readers, “President Trump has repeatedly informed us that we are a ‘stupid country’ — he offered this opinion on at least nine occasions since he launched his campaign for the presidency — and he should know. As he reminded us after his NATO meeting last week, he is a ‘very stable genius’.” Milbank observed, “It is furthermore the president’s highly intelligent opinion we have been led by ‘stupid people’ and ‘our laws are so corrupt and stupid’. We have been stupid about trade. We have been stupid in dealing with Iraq, Iran, China, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Muslims. We have the ‘dumbest’ immigration laws. Among the many stupid things, Trump has identified: White House staffers, the FBI, the National Football League, Democrats, the filibuster, and journalists.” The irony is that Trump’s most zealous supporters did not — and many still do not — fathom the disdain in which he holds them, nor do they understand their culpability in having contributed to the dismal state of affairs about which Trump incessantly complains.
The existing evidence does not auger well for the future of this republic. Unless we can overcome – quickly – our increasing, dismal state of ignorance, the prognosis for all of us and our descendants is not hopeful as we descend into an authoritarian dystopia controlled by authoritarians and plutocrats.