I was going to respond to Mu Yixiao’s comment about not believing the Cato survey noted in my previous post, but I realized it was going to get long, and as any hard-working blogger knows, you shouldn’t waste content!
I will provide two anecdotes that I may have shared before that make me utterly believe that it is possible that only roughly half of all adults surveyed knew what we were celebrating on July 4, 2026.
Scene One: Separating Those Powers!
One semester, I was teaching American National Government. The second unit of the class focused on the separation of powers, starting with the Congress. I don’t know how many times I said some version of the following: “Legislative power is the power to make the laws, executive power is the power to put the laws into practice, and judicial power is the power to interpret the meaning of the law.”
I would say it over.
And over.
And over again.
I emphasized that these were specific kinds of governing power, absent any issue of where those powers might reside in a government.
So (and I remember this vividly), one day I was passing out the exams, and I said, “Well, if you don’t know the answer to the first question, you might as well leave now.”
Here was the first question (pulled from my files, and not just from memory):
- Legislative power is:
- a. The power to make the laws
- b. The power to put the laws into practice.
- c. The power to interpret the meaning of the laws
- d. All of the above.
- e. b &c.
I thought I was providing levity to the moment (exam days were always a bit tense). While no one got up and left, it turned out that some of them probably should have. I forget the exact number, but at least a third of the class did not get that question correct.
This was a self-selected audience whose job it was to learn this stuff, and who had had the concept repeated to them, and yet roughly a third of them didn’t know.
Scene Two: That’s Dick Cheney!
In January of 2001, I had the news of Bush innauguration on in my living room. My oldest son, who had just turned four in December, pointed at the TV and said, “Daddy, that’s Dick Cheney.” This is, no doubt, an indictment of how much news I watched at the time.
I thought it would be fun to make the bonus question on the first exam in American National Government a photo of Dick Cheney and ask the students to identify him. I honestly thought that all but a handful would get the bonus and we could all share a laugh about the handful of students who did not know as much as a four-year-old (which, through the prism of time, I now know would have been a jerk move).
The ability to have a laugh was dashed when only about a quarter of the class could identify the new Vice President by seeing a picture of him.
I will confess to an additional jerk move of telling one of my advanced polisci classes the above anecdote, only to have one of those students regale his girlfriend with the tale of how funny it was that so many of the ANG got it wrong, only to realize that she was one of the ones who got it wrong.
At any rate, do I believe it is possible that half of Americans are unclear on what exactly happened 250 years ago? Yes, yes, I am.
(Although I will readily allow my anecdotes do not validate Cato’s survey one way or the other.)
