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For most of the last decade, the story told about American civic knowledge has been one of straightforward decline. This year, that story got more complicated — and more interesting.
The Good News, Briefly
According to the 2025 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey, 70% of U.S. adults can now name all three branches of government, up from 65% a year earlier. Seventy-nine percent can identify freedom of speech as a First Amendment right, up from 74% in 2024. By the narrow measure of textbook civics, Americans are getting marginally more literate, not less.
That is worth stating plainly, because it cuts against the index’s usual direction of travel. Not every indicator moves the same way at the same time, and a project that only reports decline isn’t measuring anything — it’s confirming a bias.
The Number That Matters More
But the same survey buried a far more alarming trend beneath the good news. Trust in the U.S. Supreme Court — the institution constitutionally charged with applying the civics knowledge Americans are slightly better at reciting — has collapsed. In 2019, 68% of U.S. adults said they held at least a moderate amount of trust in the Court. By March 2025, that figure had fallen to 41%, a 27-point drop in six years.
The partisan gap is now severe: 75% of Republicans report at least moderate trust in the Court, versus just 18% of Democrats — a 57-point divide that didn’t exist in anything like this form a decade ago.
Knowing how government is supposed to work and believing the people running it are doing so in good faith are two different kinds of civic health — and this year they moved in opposite directions.
Why Knowledge Without Trust Isn’t Enough
Civic literacy has always been treated, reasonably, as a leading indicator: a citizenry that understands its own institutions is better equipped to defend them. But knowledge and trust are not the same variable, and 2025’s data makes the distinction impossible to ignore. Americans are, on average, slightly better informed about how the three branches are supposed to function. They are dramatically less convinced that one of those branches is functioning in good faith.
That combination — rising literacy, collapsing trust, and a trust gap that splits almost entirely along partisan lines — is arguably more corrosive than simple ignorance. An electorate that doesn’t know how government works can be educated. An electorate that knows exactly how it’s supposed to work and has concluded, along partisan lines, that it isn’t working that way is a harder problem to solve.
What This Means for the Index
The Index tracks civic literacy as a proxy for the public’s capacity for self-governance. This year’s data is a reminder that the proxy is incomplete. A nation can pass the citizenship test and still be losing its grip on the thing the test is supposed to protect. Going forward, this indicator will track institutional trust alongside raw civic knowledge — because a citizenry that knows the rules but doubts the referees is not obviously healthier than one that simply doesn’t know the rules.
Saturday August 8th 2026
— David, The Moral Decay Index