The United States turns 250 next year. Nearly half the country cannot say what the birthday is for.
A national survey released by the Cato Institute, conducted in partnership with Morning Consult, found that 46 percent of American adults do not know the nation's 250th anniversary commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Just 53 percent got the answer right. The survey polled 2,253 adults nationwide.
The numbers land as the country prepares for its semiquincentennial in 2026, and they raise a blunt question: How do you preserve a republic when nearly half the population cannot identify the document that started it?
The survey's topline findings paint a split picture. Americans still feel something for their country. Eighty-six percent say they are grateful to be Americans. Seventy-nine percent call themselves proud to be American. Seventy-six percent hold a favorable view of the nation's founding.
Those are healthy numbers. But gratitude without knowledge is sentiment without structure.
Seventy percent of respondents said the principles established by the Founding Fathers remain relevant today. Nearly 86 percent said the Constitution is important for protecting Americans' rights and freedoms. Eighty-two percent said the Constitution has been essential to America's prosperity. On paper, the founding still commands broad respect.
Yet the same survey shows a country that senses something slipping. Fifty-seven percent believe the United States has moved away from its founding principles. Fifty-six percent fear America could lose its freedom sometime during the next 50 years. Fifty-eight percent say no political party should ever be trusted with too much power.
That last figure deserves a second look. In a country where partisanship dominates nearly every public conversation, a clear majority still holds the old republican instinct that concentrated power, in anyone's hands, is dangerous. The Founders would recognize the impulse. Whether the political class does is another matter.
Bipartisan agreement on the founding is broader than the daily news cycle might suggest. More than 81 percent of Democrats hold favorable views of America's founding. Among Republicans, that figure is 86 percent. Seventy-two percent of Democrats say the nation's founding principles remain relevant, compared with 83 percent of Republicans.
The gap widens on questions that carry more ideological freight.
Republicans are far more likely, 76 percent, to say America remains a "land of opportunity." Only 53 percent of Democrats agree. That 23-point spread captures something real about how the two coalitions see the country's basic promise. One side still believes the system works for people who work within it. The other is far less sure.
The 1619 Project's central claim, that preserving slavery was a primary reason for the American Revolution, drew 46 percent agreement among Democrats and 36 percent among Republicans. That more than a third of Republicans accepted a thesis that most professional historians have disputed is itself a sign of how deeply revisionist narratives have penetrated public understanding. That nearly half of Democrats embraced it suggests the project has reshaped baseline assumptions about the founding for a large share of the left's coalition.
On institutional questions, the divide sharpens further. Fifty-one percent of Democrats support expanding the Supreme Court from nine to 13 justices, compared with 37 percent of Republicans. And 61 percent of Democrats said they would support candidates identifying as "Democratic Socialists." The survey did not provide the comparable Republican figure.
Meanwhile, 72 percent of all respondents said presidents should obey Supreme Court rulings even when they disagree with them, a strong consensus on constitutional order that cuts across party lines.
The generational data is where the survey turns from concerning to alarming.
Nearly 61 percent of Generation Z respondents failed to identify what America's 250th anniversary celebrates. Six in ten. These are the youngest adult voters, the cohort that will inherit the republic's next quarter-century, and a commanding majority cannot name the event that created it.
The ideological numbers are just as stark. More than half of Gen Z respondents expressed favorable views of socialism. Nearly four in ten viewed communism favorably.
Let that settle. Four in ten young American adults look favorably on the system that produced the Soviet gulag, Mao's famine, and the Berlin Wall. Not as a historical curiosity. As a favorable concept.
The Cato Institute, described as pro-libertarian, did not editorialize in the survey's presentation. It didn't need to. The numbers speak plainly enough. A generation that cannot identify the Declaration of Independence is also the generation most open to political systems that would abolish the rights the Declaration enshrined.
None of this happened by accident. American civic education has been in retreat for decades. State after state has reduced or diluted requirements for history and government coursework. Where civic content survives, it increasingly competes with ideological frameworks, the 1619 Project among them, that recast the founding as a story of oppression rather than a radical experiment in self-government.
The results are now measurable. When 46 percent of all adults and 61 percent of the youngest adults cannot connect the 250th anniversary to the Declaration of Independence, the failure is not a matter of trivia. It is a structural deficit. Citizens who do not understand the origin of their rights are poorly equipped to defend them, and easily persuaded that alternative systems might serve them better.
The survey found that respondents still value core civic virtues for the next generation. But the pipeline between what Americans say they value and what they actually know about their own country has a widening crack in it.
One of the survey's sharpest partisan contrasts involves the future itself. Fifty-four percent of Republicans say the nation's best days are ahead. Among Democrats, 44 percent believe America's best days are behind it.
That gap tracks with broader patterns. The party that still views the country as a land of opportunity also believes the future holds promise. The party more inclined to see systemic failure is also more inclined toward nostalgia, or resignation.
But optimism without civic literacy is a gamble. You can believe in America's future and still be unable to articulate what makes America distinct. The Cato survey suggests that is precisely where a large share of the country now stands: proud, grateful, and unable to say what they're proud of or grateful for in any specific, historical terms.
A country that cannot name its own founding document is a country running on fumes. The 250th anniversary is a chance to refuel, but only if someone is willing to teach what happened in 1776 and why it still matters.
