> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.readtangle.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Are Americans just stupid? - URL: https://www.readtangle.com/are-americans-just-stupid/ - Published: 2026-10-21T12:41:20.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-21T12:42:12.000Z - Description: I hear this provocative idea a lot. - Author: Isaac Saul - Tags: A Grain of Saul, Are Americans stupid?, American intelligence, American literacy rates, Are Americans illiterate *Good morning. This is the debut edition of “A Grain of Saul,” a fresh newsletter from me, Isaac Saul, within the Tangle ecosystem. It’ll come out every week or two, and I’ll use it to explore controversial ideas, hot debates, trending stories, and some political-adjacent issues that don’t make it into Tangle. We’re giving these first few editions away for free, then it’ll be going behind a paywall as a perk for paying members only.* [**You can become a member here.*](http://readtangle.com/membership?ref=readtangle.com) *Enjoy!* --- As we try to identify the root causes of our political dysfunction, everyone seems comfortable pointing to a familiar group of issues. We invoke things like partisan polarization, gerrymandering, money in politics, social media algorithms, corruption, low voter turnout, and the biased media. But there’s another provocative answer that I hear all the time — less often in public, usually over a beer or in a hushed tone — from all corners of the political space: Maybe Americans… are just idiots? This is, obviously, an offensive prospect, though when any of us hear it we imagine it being about other people. *We* are not the idiots, clearly — *they* are. The *other* Americans. It’s also not a new idea; many different people have put forward the theory over time. In 1920, H.L. Mencken famously penned an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, warning that on “some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” In Jason Brennan’s *Against Democracy*, he argues most Americans are “hobbits” (uninformed and uninterested) or “hooligans” (informed but tribal). In *Democracy and Political Ignorance,* legal scholar Ilya Somin’s thesis is that widespread voter ignorance and irrational behavior is a core, unavoidable feature of democracy. Put simply, at least when it comes to politics, the average American voter doesn’t know what they’re doing. When you look around, it isn’t hard to convince yourself of this idea. You’ll find a lot of rubes. Concerning data on adult illiteracy is rampant. [Conspiracy theories abound](https://www.readtangle.com/conspiracy-theories-are-getting-dumber/). Pluck a random person off the street and ask them to name all three branches of government — what percentage do you think get it right? (I’ll fill you in momentarily.) Ask your neighbor if they can name both your state’s senators, or the member of Congress who represents your district. You might be surprised to find that very few can. But could it really be this simple? Are American politics broken because we are a representative democracy, and We the People keep sending bad candidates to office because we’re woefully ill informed; don’t make smart choices; and generally act on hate, fear, and anger rather than intelligence and logic? *Are Americans just stupid?* I’ll approach the idea openly. “Stupid” isn’t quite the word I’d use; uninformed, ignorant, or uninterested might be. Given my line of work, I’d guess that I’m in the 99th percentile of political knowledge in America. There’s no way to write that sentence without sounding arrogant and condescending, but it’s really just a function of how I spend my time. If you teach history, you are probably in the 99th percentile of Americans on historical knowledge. If you’re a mechanic, you’ll be in the 99th percentile of Americans at fixing cars. If you’re a nurse, you’ll be in the 99th percentile of Americans at treating a serious injury. I write about politics for a living, so this is what I’m good at. And being in the top 1% means I’m in a group of about 2.7 million other American adults. That subject-matter familiarity, though, has the distorting effect of making other people look ill informed even if they aren’t. For me, it’s crazy to think that if I walked around my New Jersey town asking people who our senators in Congress are, most would have a hard time naming Cory Booker and Andy Kim. One 2016 survey [found](https://www.masslive.com/politics/2016/03/edward%5Fm%5Fkennedy%5Finstitute%5Fpol.html?ref=readtangle.com) that only 46% of Americans knew that they had two senators in the first place, let alone were able to name both of them. Even the things we hold most dear about our country, which are beaten into our brains from grade school into adulthood, don’t seem to sink in. This year, the annual Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey [found](https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/third-americans-cannot-name-three-branches-government?ref=readtangle.com) just 9% of American adults could name all five First Amendment freedoms (religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition). 24% couldn’t name a single one. 25% thought the right to bear arms was a First Amendment protection (it’s the Second Amendment). The writer and political commentator Matt Yglesias recently explored this question through an unusual lens — by wondering aloud if *he* was wildly out of touch (his answer was yes, definitely). One way Yglesias reached his conclusion was by noting that many Americans struggle to read, let alone consume his high-level political analysis and understand it. [From his piece](https://www.slowboring.com/p/in-defense-of-being-wildly-out-of?ref=readtangle.com): > Half of adults read below a 6th grade level. All questions of snobbery and nepo babies aside, the typical American could not do the job of even a really incompetent journalist. They would, in fact, struggle badly to even read and understand journalism outputs. > > Schools widely use the Lexile scale to assess both reading competence and the difficulty of written materials. A typical New York Times article is a 1380 on the scale, which is in the upper range of grade level for 11th and 12th grades. If you can read a New York Times article, you are part of the hyper-literate educated elite. If you mostly socialize with people who can pull this off, you exist in a kind of out-of-touch bubble. > > Which is to say it’s not just the people who produce the content but the entire audience for the content that is rather eccentric. Taking all of this together, the “Americans are stupid” camp makes the following conclusions: A lot of Americans are uneducated and ignorant. They can’t read or comprehend high school-level text, and they don’t know anything about how the American government works. Therefore, they consistently make bad choices when voting in elections, if they vote at all, and that is the proximate cause of so much political dysfunction. This is a problem, because it means educating Americans about an issue, or showing them data, or running on a platform “based in reality” won’t actually convince voters to elect smart, effective legislators into government. I like this theory, as far as provocative theories go, and I think I could probably defend it in a debate if I had to. But it’s pretty easy to dismantle. --- For starters, the words “intelligence” and “educated” are constantly used sloppily in the context of American politics. We all seem to discuss intelligence as if its definition is “understanding how government works” or “knowing things about politics,” and the traditional way we discuss intelligence in politics is to conflate it with education, then draw lines between college-educated and non-college-educated. In my experience, the supposed correlation between educated and non-educated or intelligent and stupid is rather silly. Is my friend with a high school degree who runs his own business installing garage doors going to know less about tax policy than a Pratt graduate with a photography degree? Is someone who dropped out of college and is working a minimum wage job going to be *less* in tune with the state of the economy, price of goods or challenges of day-to-day living than a high-earning, college-educated programmer in the tech sector? It seems we’re supposed to think “uneducated” people can’t make political decisions to benefit themselves, but I just don’t actually think that conclusion is obvious at all. I’d even argue it’s plainly untrue. Even when we agree on the definition of intelligence (one popular definition is “the mental capacity to learn, understand, reason, solve problems, adapt to new situations, and apply knowledge”), the construct itself is impossible to measure. Take Yglesias’s claim about American adults reading at a sixth-grade level: It is somehow shocking and unsurprising all at once; it’s a remarkable number, and it affirms many of our priors about an inadequate education system in America. It’s also probably bunk. In The Argument, Elliot Haspel and Ivana Greco [responded](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/are-most-americans-illiterate?ref=readtangle.com) to Yglesias and made a strong case that he is misinterpreting literacy data. Applying reading grade levels to adults is basically impossible (the test Yglesias cited measures comprehension of written pieces, and they don’t get mapped onto grade-level equivalents). Indeed, in 2024, 68% of 12th graders could process 12th-grade-level text, meaning (as the test defines it) they were able to “identify and relate aspects of the text to its overall meaning, extend the ideas in the text by making simple inferences, recognize interpretations, make connections among and relate ideas in the text to their personal experiences, and draw conclusions.” That’s a lot more than half, and it’s about 12th-grade-level text. It sure sounds a lot like intelligence, too. Even the survey results about how ignorant people are on U.S. politics can be inconsistent or flawed. Remember my question about how many Americans can name all three branches of government? In 2016, Annenberg [found](https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/americans-knowledge-of-the-branches-of-government-is-declining/?ref=readtangle.com) that just 26% could. In 2026, though, that number had [gone up to 65%](https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/third-americans-cannot-name-three-branches-government?ref=readtangle.com). Two changes impacted the trend: 1) Americans got a crash course in government when Trump won the presidency, and 2) Annenberg started conducting its survey online rather than by phone. Researchers who study survey methods believe people who take online surveys do better for a few reasons: They can look answers up, they perform better without time pressure, and they’re more accurate when typing versus speaking. To me, though, the implication is that measuring this kind of intelligence in a clean and reliable way is actually quite hard. Bad numbers could be the product of nerves as much as knowledge; good numbers could be the product of cheaters as much as knowledge. We just don’t know. These survey dynamics go beyond just methodology. For example, Yale researchers [documented](https://isps.yale.edu/resource/partisan-bias-in-factual-beliefs-about-politics-0?ref=readtangle.com) a phenomenon where Americans answer survey questions as “partisan cheerleaders” rather than in an effort to get the question correct. So if a Republican is asked about the economy when a Republican is in office, they are more likely to say it’s doing well than if a Democrat is in office. Researchers found this out by paying survey respondents to answer questions correctly and finding the partisan gap in how people respond significantly narrowed. In a similar vein, partisan ideology can also overwhelm someone’s most basic problem-solving capacities, like arithmetic. [Dan Kahan’s famous 2012 study](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5Fid=2182588&ref=readtangle.com) on motivated reasoning found that a person’s ability to interpret data accurately dropped significantly if the correct answer contradicted their political beliefs. He discovered this by giving participants the exact same data sets to determine if an intervention made a situation better or worse. In one data set, the intervention was applied to skin care and whether it cured rashes. In another, it was applied to banning concealed handguns and whether it decreased crime. The numbers were set up so the participant could not just look at the raw total of positive outcomes, but had to calculate and compare ratios and percentages. In the skin care scenario, people who were good at math easily calculated the correct answer regardless of their political leanings. In the gun control data, participants’ math skills were diminished significantly by their own political biases. Highly numerate and partisan participants routinely botched the math to get to the conclusion they wanted. The implication here is that being smart — even in something as objective as math — doesn’t stop you from so much motivated reasoning that you’ll come to the wrong conclusion on data you are presented with. Are these people dumb? Or are they just ideological? The answer to me seems obvious. For what it’s worth, there are some encouraging signs, too: Annenberg’s 2026 civics survey found that 83% of Americans know a two-thirds vote in both chambers overrides a presidential veto. Three-quarters of Americans understand birthright citizenship, and a similar number know freedom of speech is part of the First Amendment. 60% know that the Supreme Court is the final say on what’s constitutional, while 17% inaccurately think it’s Congress and just 4% think it’s the president. 19% say they aren’t sure. Even just 9% of Americans being able to name the five freedoms endowed by the First Amendment isn’t all that worrisome to me — I named four in my head easily (religion, speech, press, assembly) but couldn’t think of “petition.” If it were a phone call, I probably would have gotten it wrong. These numbers don’t scream “civics crisis” to me. Yet, the idea that permeates news coverage and punditry across the country is that Americans are too stupid to govern themselves — it’s often implicit and unsupported. Take a recent story that we covered in Tangle: President Trump’s [promise to give $5,000 to every American](https://www.readtangle.com/trump-dividend-midterm-promise/) if Republicans hold onto the House and Senate. Most of the press was aghast at this overt election-style bribe, and nearly every piece of writing analyzing it was written with an underlying assumption (and fear) that Americans might fall for it. After all, the evidence — Trump’s repeated, similar promises that never came to fruition, and the absurd cost — all point to the reality that the president will never actually cut those checks. Despite fears Americans were going to take the bait hook, line and sinker, the [data paints almost the exact opposite picture](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/10/18/americans-doubt-trump-dividend-poll/92318644007/?ref=readtangle.com). Just 14% of respondents to an NBC Decision Desk poll said they thought they would receive the payment. 71% said they definitely or probably would not get it, and the rest said they were unsure. How much the media’s coverage drove those results is unknown, but the plain reality is that Americans just aren’t as gullible or stupid as we so often assume. Similarly, contrary to popular belief, [studies](https://mitsloan.mit.edu/press/why-do-people-around-world-share-fake-news-new-research-finds-commonalities-global-behavior?ref=readtangle.com#:~:text=The%20researchers%20also%20discovered%20that%20when%20averaging%20as%20few%20as%2020%20participant%20ratings%2C%20it%20was%20possible%20to%20identify%20false%20headlines%20with%20very%20high%20accuracy%2C%20leveraging%20the%20%E2%80%9Cwisdom%20of%20crowds%E2%80%9D%20to%20help%20platforms%20spot%20misinformation%20at%20scale.) show that ordinary citizens in America and across the globe are actually pretty good at spotting misinformation. [One study](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8442902/?ref=readtangle.com) found that a small, politically balanced crowd of “laypeople” correlated well with professional fact-checkers’ ratings of news accuracy. We fuss about the 6% of Americans who once told Gallup that the moon landing was faked to create an image of a conspiracy-brained populace, but the flip side is that 89% said it wasn’t. Pollsters from Gallup [have noted](https://news.gallup.com/poll/3712/landing-man-moon-publics-view.aspx?ref=readtangle.com#:~:text=Although%2C%20if%20taken%20literally%2C%206%25%20translates%20into%20millions%20of%20individuals%2C%20it%20is%20not%20unusual%20to%20find%20about%20that%20many%20people%20in%20the%20typical%20poll%20agreeing%20with%20almost%20any%20question%20that%20is%20asked%20of%20them%20%2D%2D%20so%20the%20best%20interpretation%20is%20that%20this%20particular%20conspiracy%20theory%20is%20not%20widespread) that you can get roughly 6% of people to agree with almost anything in a poll. Where we can actually measure hard skills like practical problem solving, Americans come in slightly below the average of developed nations. Not exceptional, not even great, but not a disaster. Rather unremarkable, actually. So, what do we do with all of this? My sense is that concluding that “Americans are stupid” or “Americans are ill informed” as a cause for our political dysfunction is akin to blaming my own weight gain on not understanding how the body processes carbohydrates and sugars. Just like my neighbors may not be able to explain how a bill becomes law, I couldn’t begin to tell you what *actually* happens inside my body when I eat a loaf of bread or a chocolate bar. Some endorphins get released, I think. Something about glucose. My intestines go to work. There’s acid that breaks stuff down. Still, I know what bread and chocolate look like. I know how they taste. I know if I eat them every night for weeks on end I’ll gain a lot of weight and feel very bad, and if I do that my entire life I won’t end up very healthy. Would I be better at dieting or controlling my eating if I better understood how it all worked? Probably! Is the reason I’m gaining weight because I’m ill informed on how the body processes food? Probably not. Voters who can’t name both of their senators — or even read at a high school level — may also be perfectly capable of watching two candidates debate and deciding which one is better for their family or their community. It’s actually pretty silly to convince ourselves otherwise. So, is the root of all our problems American idiocy? I doubt it. We could all stand to learn a bit more about how our government works and pay a little closer attention to the details. Certainly, our education system has plenty of room to improve. But blaming our dysfunction on an illiterate, ill-informed society doesn’t quite add up. ****Don’t forget: If you enjoyed this piece,** [****be sure to subscribe to Tangle**](http://readtangle.com/membership?ref=readtangle.com)****. These newsletters will be going behind a paywall, and becoming a member doesn’t just unlock them — it supports our mission and keeps this work alive.** [****Subscribe here**](http://readtangle.com/membership?ref=readtangle.com)****.** [Join Tangle! ](www.readtangle.com/membership )