Distrust, Disempowerment, and the Importance of Political Literacy
+ why it’s up to us to fix our own politics
Tomorrow is election day in thousands of places around the US. These off-cycle elections typically have way lower turnout, if you’re not sure if you have a race in your area, head to your state or city .gov website, check the calendar, spend a few minutes looking up election specifics and make a plan to vote.
A little while ago I wrote about how a substantial proportion of Americans lack basic knowledge about their government, and how this gap in knowledge hurts young, would-be voters specifically. Not knowing about or understanding politics doesn’t just decrease the likelihood that someone turns out to vote, it also leads to other negative outcomes that make politics more dysfunctional for everyone.
A lack of insight into democratic processes and our own individual political power results in a broken political environment, where people can be more easily misled by deceptive narratives. Our informational void our politics and government serves as a playground for social and traditional media manipulators to fan the flames of division and distraction. A well-informed citizenry holds the democratic fabric together by allowing for constructive political discourse, which is fundamentally necessary for us to hold elected officials accountable.
Not only does our unawareness make us easier to fool, it’s also likely related to our unwillingness to trust government. A recent study by the PEW Research Center unveiled a troubling trend: only 20% of respondents reported they trust the government to do what is right “all of the time” or “most of the time,” signaling a significant decline in government trust since the early 2000s. This lack of trust isn’t confined to specific age groups or races; it’s a universal phenomenon, indicating a broad and shared sense of governmental disillusionment.
It’s very hard to trust anything that we don’t understand. How can we? If we don’t know how a system works, who does what, and what the limits of their powers should be, how can we even form a basis of trust? Not having trust in government is sad on it’s own, but it cascades in ways that make every part of our political lives harder.
Our large sense of distrust is not just reserved for faceless institutions but extends to the individual figures of authority of government. Over 50% of the public believes that the government doesn’t represent people like them, and a mere 18% report being content with the government. Those who think that government actors don’t rely represent them are — in many cases — not totally wrong; looking at the federal level richer people tend to have their preferences represented more than all others. But at the local and state level, each individual is more pivotal and much more able to contribute their views into political outcomes. The important state and local level of politics are in bright display right now with tens of thousands of elections happening this month all over the United States.
Mistrust and the correlated decline in governmental knowledge render individuals susceptible to even more manipulation and misinformation, which in turn leads to a loop of further distrust. This state of being allows different propaganda networks to fill in fuzzy parts of our understandings with things that are not true, and the spiral feeds itself.
What’s more problematic from my perspective as a parent and political science professor is that a pervasive anti-government view does not do much to change government if it means just turning people off to learning and doing more. A study by Anna Zhelnina based on Russian attitudes towards government following the anti-regime protests of 2011–2012 found that many of the political youth had succumbed to “apathy syndrome”. It’s not hard to see how this works. When we get frustrated over and over by negative politics, and by pervasive anti-government anti-political stories, we start thinking that trying to do things together just doesn’t work. This kind of negative feeling can get even stronger if we grow up in families or go to schools where people don’t seem to care much about what’s going on, or if society tells us it’s not cool to care about politics. To deal with this, lots of people just pull away from politics, and rationalize why they’re not stepping up to make a change, or even “wasting time” caring.
Without a fundamental understanding of democratic structures and principles, sensational claims find mental ground to root in, making it easier to spread misinformation and impacting the collective well-being of our nation. It is necessary to raise a generation capable of discerning truth from falsehood, ensuring informed decision-making and understanding of political outcomes.
It’s up to ALL of us
Understanding how the government works is not just a task for new voters, all of us have a responsibility to figure out our own role, the roles of our elected and appointed representatives, and the structures underpinning our system. Knowing these things might seem unimportant — especially to those who think individuals don’t matter in a larger system — but taking that head in the sand route is a cop-out that we shouldn’t expect or accept from our adults. We are a part of this system whether we like it or not, and we don’t have to learn to like it, but we ought to be able to learn to understand it. If not only to show a model of citizenship to our kids, but to help ourselves. Anyone who has a better understanding a system, no matter how complex or how seemingly unrelated to other parts of their lives, will have a better basis for not being stressed by that system. In any case, embracing and figuring out things that stress us — even if that’s stressful in the first place — is a better long term approach to stress overall.
Right now we are living through a slow moving crisis of political illiteracy. Many of our adults, voters or not, do not have a firm grasp on how governing happens. In many ways this is not surprising, most of us were not taught in school, had parents who found the topic taboo, and we live such packed lives that consume so much of our brain power each day, that it feels impossible to add another thing to the long lists of just doing life.
And yet, work of all sorts requires people to master new systems/softwares, leisure demands knowledge of different technologies and subscription services and algorithm management, staying on top of school emails for children is meme fodder — and a real challenge, commuting requires traffic know-how and planning, caring for the older adults in our lives means learning byzantine Medicare and hospital systems, managing screen-time for our kids is a health concern, and no one wants to fall victim to phishing or identity fraud so we must stay on guard, oh and we have to acquire food and cook each day as well as sleep. That is, we know how to manage and navigate many other stressful systems. The neat thing about figuring out politics, is that when we do, we can change our outcomes.
Despite us having little time for detailed political/government study and awareness, we have a media environment — for the most part — that operates on outrage and a good number of political actors who work to rile up that beast. I don’t so much blame the media for their tactics, their incentives are clicks and eye-balls, so getting quickly to root emotions through outrage is an understandable — though regrettable — strategy. And I don’t really fault anyone clicking and reading and getting ruffled by this sort of content. But I do know that if we don’t want to live on high alert in some form of exasperated crisis response to another, we have to take it upon ourselves to learn the system, understand what we can expect from it, and work to take the collective temperature down.
