America is illiterate. In 2025, around 79% of adults are considered sufficiently literate, but 21% still struggle with basic reading, with nearly half reading below a 6th-grade level. However, the problem goes deeper. We no longer read critically, or with any sustained attention. We skim, scroll, react, and forget. We consume content without actually digesting it. And in this gap between literacy as a skill and literacy as a cultural value, modern American politics has found ripe soil for manipulation.
The Trump era has helped reveal the terrifying political power of a nation that can read but cannot comprehend. We are moved more by spectacle than by substance. As stated above, national literacy surveys repeatedly show that the average American reads at or below a middle school level. Reading proficiency among adults has stagnated or declined, and many states report that significant percentages of their high school graduates can’t parse texts beyond the most basic level. Yet we live in an era when the written word has never been more ubiquitous.
This contradiction creates a society that is saturated with information but starved of meaning. Deep reading, the kind required to understand argumentation, nuance, metaphor, or philosophical reasoning, has been replaced by the dopamine-drip of fragmented content. Social media has made language disposable. News outlets have adapted to the new market by compressing complex stories into headlines designed to provoke emotion instead of reflection.
A nation that loses the ability to read deeply also loses the ability to think deeply. The Trump era capitalized on this cognitive collapse with uncanny precision. All he needed was an audience hungry for emotional certainty. Even his way of communicating is fabricated for a society that has stopped engaging with complex language.
In a country where people struggle with comprehension, they’re easily seduced by simplicity. Build the wall. Make America great again. Witch hunt. Fake news. Rigged election. These are slogans engineered to bypass critical thinking and tap directly into identity and fear. Their power lies in how little they require of the listener. They’re linguistic shortcuts for people who have been conditioned to avoid complexity.
If a democracy depends on an informed electorate, then illiteracy is a political vulnerability. Philosophers from Plato to Arendt understood that democratic stability requires citizens capable of reasoning, weighing evidence, and debating ideas. These are the same cognitive capacities nurtured by reading literature, analyzing argumentative essays, and engaging with long-form writing.
Novels introduce empathy, philosophy introduces abstraction, history welcomes the practice of discernment, and journalism invites skepticism. Trumpism thrives because scrutiny itself has become a lost art. The essay (things like this) is now considered elitist, too long, or boring. The shrinking attention span in itself becomes a political weapon, because a society that is unable to read a paragraph without drifting to another tab is a society primed for authoritarian messaging. Authoritarianism requires followers who respond, not readers who question.
We often misdiagnose the political divide as urban vs. rural, educated vs. working class, or liberal vs. conservative. But beneath these surface differences lies a more fundamental divide: readers and non-readers. Reading is a mode of engaging with the world. Readers are forced to slow down, to consider context, and to sit with ambiguity. Non-readers live in the realm of immediacy, impulse, and unexamined belief.
Social media exploits this divide by creating entire ecosystems where literacy is optional and reaction is rewarded. Misinformation thrives in formats that require no reading comprehension. In Trump’s political universe, literacy is a liability. A literate public can see through manipulation while an illiterate public becomes loyal through emotional dependency.
Today’s authoritarian threats don’t have to rely on burning books (however, we’re still witnessing open bans and document changes). They know that many citizens will never open them. We’ve stopped critically reading news, court decisions, and investigative reports. We believe memes over legal evidence. We trust slogans over documents. We put our faith in AI slop and narratives that require no cognitive effort.
In a literate society, authoritarianism has to silence dissent. However, in an illiterate society, authoritarianism simply has to be loud. There is no purely political solution to a cultural literacy crisis. Voting out an authoritarian doesn’t cure the environment that allowed him to rise. Democracy depends on people capable of sustained attention and minds shaped by reflection, and for many, reflection is uncomfortable.