A Country That Doesn’t Know History Is Ripe For The Picking

most of this country is ignorant of history and we are paying for it

In classrooms across America, history is disappearing, sanitized for controversy, or pushed aside entirely. Civics has become relic, social studies almost gone. And the result is a generation of Americans growing up ignorant of the very story that shaped their rights, responsibilities, and place in the world. That vacuum didn’t just happen. It was engineered. And into that vacuum stepped Donald Trump.

To understand the rise of Trump—and the continued hold he has on a significant portion of the electorate—we have to confront a hard truth: this country has grown dangerously ignorant of its own past. And that ignorance isn’t just unfortunate. It’s strategic. It’s profitable. It’s political. And it’s deeply, profoundly dangerous.

Let’s start with the numbers. In the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress—what some call “The Nation’s Report Card”—only 14 percent of eighth graders were deemed proficient in U.S. history. Fourteen percent. That’s the lowest score ever recorded. In civics, the numbers aren’t much better. A 2022 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that less than half of Americans could name all three branches of government. One in four couldn’t name any. And when asked whether the Constitution allows the president to ignore a Supreme Court ruling, a majority didn’t know the answer.

Historical ignorance runs even deeper. In a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, a significant percentage of adults could not identify key facts about the Civil War, the Cold War, or the Holocaust. A 2023 poll found that 45 percent of American adults couldn’t name a single concentration camp, and 60 percent didn’t know how many Jews were killed during the Holocaust. These are not minor lapses. They are fundamental gaps in moral and civic knowledge—openings that make citizens vulnerable to demagoguery, propaganda, and the appeal of authoritarian strongmen.

Donald Trump didn’t cause this vacuum. But he exploited it masterfully. In a country where fewer and fewer people can distinguish fact from myth, where history has been replaced by slogans, and where civic knowledge is treated as elitist, Trump’s culture of nationalism and grievance finds fertile soil. When voters don’t know what fascism looks like, they’re less likely to recognize its early symptoms. When they can’t recall the dangers of unchecked executive power, they’re more likely to cheer it on.

It’s not hard to draw the line from educational neglect to political dysfunction. The less Americans know about the Constitution, the more willing they are to believe that it permits things like banning entire religions, or prosecuting political opponents, or refusing to concede elections. The fewer people who understand how McCarthyism destroyed lives or how Jim Crow disenfranchised an entire race, the easier it is to resurrect those tactics under new names.

This is no accident. In red states across the country, Republican lawmakers are working to further restrict the teaching of history. They pass laws banning “divisive concepts,” rewriting curricula to exclude systemic racism, slavery, or the struggle for civil rights. Florida, Texas, and other conservative strongholds have mandated so-called “patriotic education,” which whitewashes our past in favor of a sanitized, feel-good narrative that erases conflict, pain, and the hard-won gains of marginalized communities. Trump himself launched the 1776 Commission—a direct rebuke to the New York Times’ 1619 Project—which aimed to replace historical inquiry with state-sponsored mythmaking.

This is all about control. It’s about building a citizenry that is pliable, misinformed, and suspicious of expertise. A public that doesn’t know what happened yesterday is easy to lie to today. And that is precisely the environment Trump thrives in. His rise was made possible not only by rage and racism, but by ignorance—cultivated and celebrated. A public stripped of its historical literacy is a public ripe for manipulation.

The data backs this up. A 2023 PRRI poll found that Americans who believed the U.S. was “founded as a Christian nation” were significantly more likely to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Many didn’t know—or refused to believe—that the Constitution expressly forbids religious tests for office. Another poll from the University of Chicago found that belief in QAnon-style conspiracy theories was closely correlated with low levels of civic knowledge. In short, the less history you know, the more likely you are to believe that Trump won the election, that Democrats drink children’s blood, or that the Founders wanted guns in every church.

Trump’s political genius lies not in persuasion, but in replacement—replacing knowledge with narrative, truth with spectacle. He doesn’t argue. He asserts. He doesn’t cite history. He invents it. He doesn’t honor the rule of law. He mocks it. And in a country where many schools no longer teach the full scope of slavery, Reconstruction, the labor movement, the internment of Japanese Americans, or the rise of European fascism, those lies go unchallenged.

It’s no wonder, then, that Trump has made war on education itself. From calling teachers “left-wing indoctrinators” to threatening federal funding for schools that teach critical race theory (which virtually none of them do), he has identified the classroom as a threat to his power. And he’s not wrong. An educated public—one that understands the Emancipation Proclamation, the Voting Rights Act, the Nuremberg Trials, or the Watergate hearings—is a public that might see through him. That’s why history must be distorted, censored, or removed.

This is classic authoritarianism. It doesn’t begin with tanks in the streets. It begins with the erosion of truth. It begins with the discrediting of teachers. The banning of books. The silencing of historians. It begins with the loss of a shared narrative—a sense of where we’ve been and who we are. And once that narrative is gone, anything can be invented in its place. Trump’s myth of a “great America” before the fall, a paradise lost to immigrants and feminists and climate scientists, only works if people don’t know what actually happened in our past, even in our recent past.

We have to fight for the classroom. We have to demand better funding for public education, better training for teachers, and the reinstatement of robust, unflinching history curricula. We have to support organizations that defend academic freedom. We have to vote for school board members who believe in truth. We have to push back against every book ban, every sanitized textbook, every curriculum bill that seeks to erase the stories of Black Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, workers, women, and dissidents.

Democracy must be taught. It must be learned. It must be earned by every generation, especially now.

Because a country that forgets its past is not just condemned to repeat it. It’s condemned to surrender to the loudest voice in the room. And right now, that voice belongs to a man who wants to rewrite the rules, erase the record, and teach our children that truth is whatever he says it is. We cannot let that happen. Not ever again.