The metrics are miserable — alarming and stark. Civic and constitutional literacy among Americans of all ages has plummeted to ominous depths. One 2024 study found that a third of American adults could not name all three branches of the federal government; 1 in 6 could not name any. Asked to name the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, only 39 percent could name the freedom of religion and only 29 percent the freedom of the press. Another 2024 survey found that 60 percent of American undergraduates did not know the term lengths for members of Congress. About half identified Thomas Jefferson as “the father of the Constitution,” and a similar number identified 1776 as the year the Constitution was drafted. Less than a third knew that Congress wields the power to declare war. Three-quarters could not identify the president of the Senate, and two-thirds could not identify the chief justice. By contrast, 89 percent could identify Jeff Bezos as the owner of Amazon.
At the same time, partisan polarization has metastasized. The country’s political camps regard one another with mounting mutual antipathy. Indeed, contempt for the other party — and fear of what it might do to the country’s future — may be each party’s strongest unifying strand. Political differences increasingly wreck family relationships and ruin incipient romance. Venomous partisan polarization threatens our capacity to live together and govern ourselves in a viable constitutional republic.
These two trends — partisan polarization and constitutional illiteracy — are, I submit, intimately related. As knowledge about the Constitution ebbs, so does allegiance to it. And because the Constitution was designed in significant part to keep partisan passions at bay, constitutional drift fuels partisan enmity. The future health of our constitutional republic requires that we increase our own knowledge of the U.S. Constitution and do more to transmit such knowledge to the rising generation.
As Yuval Levin has argued in his book, ”American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — And Could Again,” the Constitution is a charter of national unity. Its structure requires us to live and govern together. If we honor its letter and spirit, the Constitution demands mutual negotiation and accommodation across our differences. With its elegant interplay of separated powers and checks and balances, the Constitution pushes competing interests — what the founding generation called “factions” — to collaborate in an enduring project of shared governance. Realizing that sharp differences were an inevitable byproduct of freedom, the founders made a virtue of necessity — they turned a bug into a feature — by harnessing the bewildering variety of interests across a large and diverse republic in the defense of liberty. The Constitution was never intended to liquidate difference; it was designed to channel difference into the intergenerational project of self-government.
Writing as “Publius” in the famous 10th essay of the Federalist Papers, James Madison maintained that the diversity of a large republic made it less likely that any one faction would ever gain complete control. In addition, the Constitution created structures designed to lower the stakes of national politics. It did so in four principal ways.
First, it divided power between the federal government and the states, thereby preserving diversity among the states and limiting federal power.
Second, it separated powers within the federal government both by allocating powers among the legislative, executive and judicial branches and by enabling each branch to balance and check the others.
Third, it provided that officers of the federal government would be chosen at different times, by different means and for different tenures, thus limiting the consequences and significance of any one election.
And fourth, it enshrined certain core individual rights against government encroachment, thereby shielding fundamental freedoms from political contestation.
Our present impasse is the product of forgetting or diluting these basic principles. The course of our constitutional history has been to inflate the powers of the federal government at the expense of the states and to inflate the powers of the executive branch (and, to a lesser extent, of the judicial branch) at the expense of the legislature. The result is that national politics, and specifically presidential politics, seem all-important. The outcome of each election strikes many as existential.
The true existential threat to the republic, however, is not a specific politician or party. It is our collective ignorance of and weakening allegiance to core constitutional principles. The cure for this is education and engagement — a unique brand of constitutional patriotism that places loyalty to constitutional principle above any partisan interest.
Justin Collings is the academic vice president and professor of law at Brigham Young University and a contributing scholar at BYU’s Wheatley Institute.
This story appears in the July/August 2025 issue of DeseretMagazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.