How did American Voters Get so Dumb?
It's a modern fetish that we're brilliant while our ancestors were idiots. After all, they didn't have iphones, internets, or Kim Kardashian.
This is also academic consensus, for what it's worth: called the Flynn Effect, the idea is people do better on puzzles so we must be smarter.
Of course, one wonders if puzzles translate into, say, understanding monetary policy or how welfare destroys families.
The Rise of Dumb Politics
Thankfully, we have a real-world test: actual political campaigns.
Back when I was a professor, I ran every inaugural address through a Flesch-Kincaid text analysis to measure the grade level. The logic being top speech-writers know how to talk at voters' level.
Going by grade level, it turns out we are getting dumb breathtakingly fast.
In 1900 inaugurals were written at between 13th and 14th grade -- modern college level. Today they're 8th grade for Obama, 9th grade for Trump, and... 7th grade for Biden.
It gets worse the further back we go: Andrew Jackson's 1828 inaugural was written at 22nd grade -- meaning, strictly speaking, two phd's was the median voter in 1828.
Keep in mind Jackson was a populist man-of-the-people -- Washington's inaugural was closer to 26th grade.
Also keep in mind almost nobody in 1828 -- or 1789 -- had a formal education.
Jackson kicks off with "Undertaking the ardous duties that I have been appointed," Washington starts with "Among the vicissitudes incident to life," for Biden it's "This is America's day."
So how did we get so dumb?
Easy: public schools.
Public School: Indoctrination, not Education
The modern government school came from 1800's Prussia, who had enough of worker riots and peasant revolts, and resolved to indoctrinate kids into pro-regime obedience.
It worked a charm, turning the once unruly Germans into a government-directed army that went on to do terrible things.
Left-wing American intellectuals were fascinated by Prussia's indoctrination and imported it to the US. They were motivated not by peasant revolts, but by the frustratingly small-government ethos of Catholics.
Progressives figured they can't frog-march American Catholics into government utopia, but they have the children.
These activists spread government schools to every state, and got a major boost post-war, when competence tests were declared discriminatory, forcing companies to instead rely on formal education to discover talent.
This launched the university from a fringe toy for the 1% into a $300,000 tax on anybody hoping for a white collar job.
Meanwhile, like all government programs, opportunists -- teachers unions -- took over, spending $878 billion per year dutifully peddling politics but neglecting the actual purpose of education, leaving American kids illiterate and innumerate.
In a video last year I mentioned how fully 23 Baltimore schools had precisely zero students proficient in math, and in Detroit 96% of students lack proficiency in math -- 95% can't even read. But by gum they know their demi-genders.
Take people who can't name a state or don't know what the Supreme Court is, wash them with decades of left-wing propaganda, stick them in a voting booth, and here we are.
Conclusion
If we're to save our democracy, we have to save our voters. By replacing government schools with schools that actually teach instead of indoctrinate.
That could mean school choice, it could mean vouchers, it could mean homeschooling co-ops. But until we fix it, things will keep getting worse.
For more on the destruction of American education, read Murray Rothbard’s classic “Education: Free and Compulsory.”'
Every week I write an article on the top stories in economics with regular deep dives into history like the Fall of Rome, the Weimar hyperinflation, or FDR’s Great Depression.
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Wow. This is something and I do mean something. I’ve read the comments on here about critical thinking and I can see that a lot of people may not actually understand those words.
Dr. Onge, has decided that using the inaugural speeches of presidents is a good way to judge public schools. One has nothing to do with the other. It has everything to do with who the President was addressing. George Washington wasn’t addressing the people of the United States. He was actually addressing the voters of that time who were white, male land owners who were mostly known to each other and often educated by tutors (do you think the average American can afford a tutor?) As time progressed and more people were able to vote, the president started to address a bigger and more diverse audience. All people change their speech to the crowd. I am a veterinarian. I don’t use medical jargon to speak to my clients (who are highly educated), I use words that everyone knows so that there is no confusion. If I were speaking to another vet, we would use the same vocabulary.
This has NOTHING to do with public schools. In fact, US public schools were the one of our most prized accomplishments just like our highway systems until Saint Reagan who really started dismantle our public school system with the false promise of school choice via charter schools. (This is conversation for a different time).
Since most inaugural speeches are written by other people, a better way to judge intelligence is to look at which grade level a president commonly speaks. During his presidency Trump spoke at 4th grade level, the lowest in the last 15 presidents. To be fair, Biden spoke at an only slightly higher level at 4.7 grade level. Both attended privates schools.
Obama and Carter, whom you all hated, commonly spoke at approximately 11th grade levels. They were educated at public schools.
Let’s not listen to a man who is an author of Project 2025 and is rabidly pro-billionaire.
High School teacher for 41 years. This article is spot on. Our public schools are more interested in social engineering rather than educating. Not only have students become 'dumb and dumber', they have become socially inept due to excessive use of social media and the paralyzing effect of technological addiction. More and more students lack verbal communication skills, they isolate from others and avoid eye contact. Instruction has to be chopped up into brief soundbites because they can't focus longer than a few minutes. A thirty minute lecture is out of the question. A vast number of students are diagnosed with learning disabilities. Perhaps many are over-diagnosed. The medication may, indeed, help some to focus but it turns others into walking zombies. Those fortunate enough to to unaffected by such hindrances are exasperated by the loss of educating opportunity due to the excessive amount of time necessary to control those who misbehave. They are bored by the factory style public school methods of educating. Every day they follow same schedule, they sit in rows, same seat, same teacher, same students, same routine. They are being educated as if they were on a factory assembly line. The really brilliant students are lost in a mass of incompetence, Controlling the miscreants is prioritized over actually educating and challenging kids. Parents no longer support educators, rather, they will defiantly and militantly defend their children at any cost, threatening lawsuits and demonstrating shocking levels of incivility. Administrators, fearing a confrontation before the school board will often throw teachers under the bus in cowardly attempts to appease irrational parents. This is just the tip of an iceberg of educational chaos caused by a Department of Education and massive, controlling unions who have very little motivation to actually educate our youth.