For all the news about Trump wiping out the branches of government, destroying checks and balances (literally, as federal financial systems are breached by DOGE), apparently American adults don’t understand social studies well enough to grasp the dangers.

People actually need critical literacy — and critical media literacy. It is not enough to simply be able to decode words at a high school or college level. People have to also be able to evaluate those words, spotting the half-truths, hyperbole, ambiguities, inaccuracies, and values behind those words — and those skills go back to social studies.

[…]

Less than half of adults can name all three branches of government. Only a third can pass the U.S. Citizenship test. Similarly, small percentages can “identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land,” the length of a U.S. Senator’s term in office, or the “number of justices on the Supreme Court.”

Ouch. But wait, it gets worse according to the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina. He explains that gross integrity breaches aren’t being measured in America, let alone reported. Read this to the tune of “I’m just a bill…”

We are literally in a place where people struggle to sort fact from fiction, legal from illegal, democratic from authoritarian. As a result, a president can unilaterally seize control of nearly the entire federal budget, and make arbitrary decisions about what should or should not be funded, and a large chunk of the American public thinks that is good policy. They don’t understand that every single dollar that is being spent has been signed off on by a majority in both houses of Congress and the president. At that point, it became law. If there was some defect in that law, it would have been the role of the judiciary to strike it down. But no one claimed that. To allow the president to wake up one morning and override those duly enacted laws turns the balance of power upon which our democracy rests upside down.

Upside down.