We talk about political polarization like it is weather. A strange fog that drifted in one day and refused to leave. It does not work that way. Polarization does not arrive. It accumulates, in what we read, in what we are taught to read, and in what we quietly stop being taught to read at all.
Two stories, told twice
Here are two headlines from the same news cycle. One: humanities programs are being gutted, departments shuttered, grants clawed back. Two: another thinkpiece asking why the country can no longer hold a civil conversation. We file these under different sections of the paper. They are the same story, told twice, by people no longer trained to notice.
Start with the gutting: not a vibe, a budget line. In the spring of 2025 the federal government moved to cancel more than a thousand National Endowment for the Humanities grants in a matter of days, alongside draconian layoffs at the agency, pulling support that Congress had already approved for libraries, museums, classrooms, and the humanities councils in all fifty states. A federal judge later ruled the mass termination unlawful and unconstitutional, but a court win does not un-cancel a year of programming that already died on the vine. And the most recent budget request proposes eliminating the endowment entirely.
The slope, not the dip
Now the second headline, with numbers attached. The most recent Nation’s Report Card shows reading scores at or near the lowest levels ever recorded. Twelfth-grade reading is the lowest since the assessment began. As NPR reported, the share of students who cannot clear the most basic reading bar keeps growing, and the slide started more than a decade ago, well before anyone could pin it on a pandemic. This isn’t a dip we’re climbing out of; it’s a slope we’re still sliding down.
The federal numbers carry the same story. In the 2023 cycle of the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, NCES reports that 28 percent of US adults score at the lowest literacy level, up from 19 percent in 2017. The gap between the most and least literate Americans is the widest PIAAC has ever measured. ProLiteracy’s reading of the same federal data now sets the count at 59 million US adults living with low literacy skills, up from 43 million in the previous PIAAC cycle. The scale of the gap is not in dispute. What is in dispute is what we are willing to spend to close it.
Reading is civic infrastructure
Critical reading is not a luxury skill or a personality quirk for people who like tote bags. It is the load-bearing ability behind a functioning democracy: the capacity to sit with ambiguity, to notice what a sentence is carefully not saying, to tell the difference between an argument and a feeling wearing an argument’s clothes. You do not need a degree in English to do it. You need a culture that treats reading slowly as a valuable adult activity. We do not currently have one.
How a reading problem becomes a polarization problem
Here is the mechanism, because “read more books” is not actually my argument. When a population loses the habit of close reading, it does not get quieter. It gets louder, faster, and much easier to sell things to. A person who can’t tell an argument from a vibe isn’t a worse human by accident; they’re a more profitable audience by design. The outrage economy runs on exactly the reading level we are now cultivating.
Polarization is what you get when a whole society processes complicated claims at headline depth. Nuance starts to read as betrayal. Disagreement reads as attack. The other side stops being people with reasons and becomes a meme to be dunked on before lunch. None of that requires anyone to be evil. It only requires a citizenry that was never given, or has slowly lost, the tools to read past its first impression.
The humanities were the training ground
This is what the humanities actually do, underneath the tired jokes about job prospects. A literature seminar is reps for the exact muscle a democracy needs: read a hard text, sit in a room with people who read it differently, defend your interpretation with evidence, and change your mind in public without treating it as a death. That’s citizenship practice, not decoration, and almost nowhere else in adult life do we get to rehearse it on purpose.
Defunding the humanities doesn’t tidy up a budget. It dismantles one of the few places we reliably teach people how to disagree well. The state councils that just lost their funding are the ones running the literacy nights, the veterans’ writing workshops, and the small-town library programs that never had a wealthy donor to fall back on. That’s civic infrastructure, not elite indulgence, and we’re letting it rust because it doesn’t photograph like a bridge.
It is worth being concrete about what actually gets cut when a humanities budget gets cut, because the abstraction does so much of the hiding. It is the community-college instructor who teaches a room of first-generation students how to read a lease, a ballot measure, and an employment contract before someone uses the fine print against them. It is the public-library program that hands a skeptical teenager a book that argues back. And the small museum that turns a county’s history into something its residents can walk through and dispute in person. None of it is glamorous. All of it is the daily maintenance of a public that can still think.
You can watch the alternative happen in real time in any comment section. A study gets published, a headline compresses it, a second headline compresses the headline, and by the time the claim reaches a feed it is a single inflammatory clause with every qualifier stripped out. The people sharing it are not lying. They cannot see the qualifiers, because no one ever trained them to look for the place where a careful writer hedges. Close reading is the skill that puts the qualifiers back, and we are quietly deciding it is optional.
The decline is not even, either, which is the part that should worry a democracy most. The gap between the strongest and weakest readers keeps widening, which means we are not producing a slightly less literate public so much as a sharply split one: a shrinking group that can still follow a long argument, and a growing group left to navigate a genuinely complicated country on headlines and hunches. That’s a recipe for two populations that can no longer hear each other at all, not for healthy disagreement.
I am not naive about why this is happening. An electorate that reads closely is harder to frighten and harder to flatter, which makes it harder to govern carelessly. The incentives run the wrong way on purpose. But incentives are not destiny, and the cheapest available act of resistance is also the least dramatic one: keep reading things that are too long for the moment and too complicated for the feed, and do it where other people can see you do it.
None of this requires a grand program to begin reversing. A household that keeps books around and lets children see adults actually reading them moves the needle. A town that funds its library at the level it funds its parking enforcement moves it further. The humanities are not fragile because people stopped caring; they are fragile because we keep filing them under luxury in a country that needs them as a utility. Reclassify the line item, then defend it like the infrastructure it is.
It is a choice, not a fog
Which brings me back to the fog. The comforting version of this story is that polarization simply happened to us, the way weather happens. The honest version is that it was chosen, line item by line item, by people who found an educated and patient public inconvenient. A population that reads closely is hard to stampede. A population that does not is a marketing opportunity, and increasingly, a voting strategy.
The fix is not complicated, and it is not free. Fund the humanities. Fund the libraries. Pay the teachers a wage that matches the importance of the work. Treat critical thinking as national infrastructure, because that is what it is, and because the countries that stop maintaining their infrastructure do not notice until something collapses.
In the meantime, build the culture yourself, because you do not need a grant to start. Read something longer than you want to. Read something you disagree with all the way to the end before you decide what you think about it. A democracy is really just a very large reading group that has agreed to keep arguing in good faith. We are losing the habit. We can choose to get it back.
So stop pretending the people who will not read past a headline are victims of a fog. They are the product of a choice. So is the alternative.