And those responsible?
- Parents
- The education system
- Teachers
- The news media
- Political parties, politicians and candidates, and
- The lazy, incurious, complacent public itself.
More than a third of U.S. adults (35%) can’t name all three branches of the government. The 2026 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,034 U.S. adults from August 6 to 9. Only 65% can name the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The results of that poll were 70% in 2025 and 65% in 2024.
Parents have an obligation to teach such basic civics, if they know it themselves. That any high school lets a student graduate without being able to name the three branches of government is disgusting and constitutes the negligent killing of democracy. I wonder how many teachers are in the 35%? I probably will be happier if I don’t find out.
Other news in the Annenberg poll are ominous but have fewer real consequences. When asked in to name the specific rights protected by the First Amendment, 73% cited Freedom of Speech, less than the 79% who got it right in 2025. Under one-half (43%) could name Freedom of Religion (because, I surmise, less than half care much about religion in today’s America), fewer than one-third (31%) named Freedom of Assembly and, surprisingly at least to me, only 29% named Freedom of the Press (29%). Almost nobody, just 12%, remembered the right to petition the government. In all, only 9% of respondents could correctly name all five rights in the First Amendment, while 24% could name none of them. A similar number, 25% thought the Right to Bear Arms, the Second Amendment, was part of the First.
You know. Morons.
The poll helps explain the infuriating campaign ads I have been seeing during the telecasts of Red Sox games this month. Democratic House member Chris Pappas (Mass.) is the most flagrant villain, telling two-digit IQ voters that he will “fight I.C.E” (Congress can’t fight I.C.E., which is an Executive Branch agency) and “block abortion bans.” If there are abortion bans they are at the state level, so Congress has no say. Nobody has seriously proposed an abortion ban at the national level, which would probably require a constitutional amendment, and that’s not happening.
“Ignorance is costly,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director emerita of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “You can’t protect and cherish rights that you don’t know you have.”
Bingo. And that’s exactly why aspiring totalitarians like the state of U.S. civic competence just the way it is.
The alphabet agencies
The lobbyists
The media
Activist judges
Those are the three branches of government
I’m not illillerate
No, just appropriately cynical.
But can you count? 😉
Ah listed three branches of guberment.
No problem regarding just one branch of government. The Democratic Socialists of America want to eliminate the executive and judiciary branches and have a unicameral congress function as the government akin to Soviet Russia and Castro’s Cuba!
I’m 67 years old. Grew up and graduated high school in Central Illinois in 1977. At that time we had to take a constitution test and pass it in order to graduate. Not that I can remember everything from my high school days, but it at least that was a start. Do they not teach this stuff in high schools any more?
I just polled my kids. My eldest, a seventh grader, properly knows two of the three branches, but calls the third the “execute – ive”. She knows some of the members of the branches (President, Congress, and Supreme Court). She is iffier on the exact nature of the branches as she struggles with remembering that the executive has more powers than that of signing bills into law and the veto, and she thinks the Supreme Court decides if laws are FAIR. My second child, a special needs fifth grader, cannot remember the names of the branches and is pretty mixed up on who is in what branch, but describes them as the branch that makes the laws, the branch that approves the laws (checks that they are fair), and the branch that passes out the laws. My second grader, kindergartener, and infant all claim to have no knowledge whatsoever, so I obviously have a lot of work to do there.
In all seriousness, if so much of the public’s knowledge of the workings of our government is equivalent to that of a special needs fifth grader, we have serious problems. I think much of this is based on the fact that the Democrats have controlled education, and if the public is stupid, it is so much easier to get and maintain power by promising what we can’t give. We also see that the DSA has stated outright that they want to get rid of the idea of three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances, as well as get rid of the Senate, so that the actions of the House is all that will run the country. This is a major concern, even if it is highly implausible. The fact that there is a major group claiming this as a goal tells us that too many people don’t disapprove of the goal.
I suppose the next poll to depress us should be having people identify the Ten Commandments. I’d give bonus points if they could name more than one division, but I guess if they could simply name the back half (no murder, adultery, stealing, false testimony, or covetessness) in any order whatsoever, I’d be happy, as those are kind of necessary for being a functional member of a civilized society. These are all basic, low level descriptions of the Golden Rule. I would hate to put money on something like this, but I bet half of the people out there can’t even do that.
It’s a very long game – educators have been destroying this country for decades and we let it happen.
This is tangentially related to the topic. I got a substack newsletter a couple days ago — one of the articles listed was one asserting that there are a number of regions in the United States liable for an apocalyptic doom. The thesis is that modern society is on a knife’s edge because of interconnections and ‘just in time’ supply chains, that there could be a cascading sequence of failure to bring down civilization.
It’s not really a new idea but I started reading it. Then when they got to Florida, they made the statement that NOAA was predicting an above average hurricane season for 2026, which meant Florida was even more at risk. I confess that I haven’t been paying attention, so I did a search for how bad a hurricane season it’s been in 2026. It turns out that in May, NOAA predicted a below average Atlantic hurricane season and, as of the end of September, we have had exactly zero hurricanes and only a handful of named storms. Zero hurricanes is almost unprecedented and we are already past the peak of the season.
So, I thought, maybe he wrote the article in the spring before NOAA’s predictions. Nope, the article was dated late August.
That gaffe was so egregious that the whole article lost all credibility for me. This was a simple fact to check (it took me about 30 seconds) — why make something up? It wouldn’t have detracted from the article to say something like next time we have a heavy hurricane season.
I guess the author just assumed either that no one would bother to check, or that all hurricane seasons now are heavy.
A little over nine (9) years ago, texagg04 posted Lefty’s highfreakin’lariously slobbering post-Katrina prediction:
2006: hurricanes are going to become more frequent and destructive!!!!!!!
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017: see! We told you so!!!!
PWS
You know who “tex” is, right?