The film "Idiocracy," starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph, was released in 2006. The setting is 500 years in the future when stupidity is the norm, the government is run by buffoons, and the world has fallen apart.

The movie has one major flaw. It is set way too far into the future. Idiocracy is already here.

How did we ever get this dumb? Q-Anon followers believe that Donald Trump is leading a heroic effort to stamp out a world-wide ring of pedophiles. Millions of Americans are convinced that global warming is a hoax, or that Covid-19 was developed in a Chinese lab, or that the moon landings were faked, or that Trump is a great businessman. There are people who believe all of those.

The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock were 100 percent literate. They sometimes had to thaw the ink to write with their quill pens, but every adult could read and write. While defining the literacy rate is difficult and subject to arguments, about 1/5 of Americans read below the fifth grade level.

We should recognize that the literacy rate is not necessarily a measure of intelligence. The inability to read may be a result of bad schools, bad teachers, bad parenting, or developmental issues. On the other hand, the number of people who believe in conspiracy theories in this country is alarming.

What should be of great concern in a democracy is a lack of civic literacy. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a liberal arts person who never took calculus or trig, is bad at spatial relationships, and forgot everything he ever learned in algebra. Nonetheless, I think most people, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, would agree that STEM subjects, while they obviously important, are not prerequisites to self-government and the survival of democracy.

We are in the middle of the most crucial presidential election campaign of our lifetime. We have a presidential candidate calling for the indictment of his opponent. We have members of a "militia" planning to kidnap a governor, "try" her, and then kill her. We have a candidate calling the election into question, labeling mail-in ballots used by millions "a fraud" and announcing that he may not accept the results if he loses.

This is not the way a democracy operates.

The question is, how did we reach this state? Here are three possible explanations.

First, many schools no longer teach civics. If you are over 50 years old, you may have taken classes in "American government" or "problems of democracy" or even "U.S. history," but you were exposed to a high school course that discussed American government and the Constitution. A large portion of high schools no longer offer those courses.

Second, newspaper reading is a forgotten art. For most of the previous century, the average American subscribed to or bought a daily newspaper. Many papers were biased, but most of them kept people at least minimally informed of the actions of local, state, and national governments. In the last two decades hundreds of newspapers have ceased publication, and many Americans now get their news from Facebook. Facebook!

Third, the polarization of American politics has coarsened political discourse. I have been to local government meetings where people in the audience accused local officials of lying or even cursed at them. Last week I was with a group of people handing out campaign signs and guys drove by yelling "F--- you" or giving us the middle finger. Again, that is not the way a democracy is supposed to work.

For over thirty-five years I taught American government to college students. I loved doing that, explaining how the government functioned, how individual citizens could exercise influence, how the Bill of Rights protected us, how we were a nation of laws, how lucky we were to live in a democracy. I don't think I could do that today.

~ Roy Christman