"But so many of the basic tenets we used to take as settled just aren't anymore. Remember checks and balances? There was a time when we assumed that no one branch of the federal government could dominate the other two to such an extent as to render precedent irrelevant. Yet, here we are. I'd have a hard time teaching checks and balances with a straight face now."
"Now there's an entire industry devoted to simply making things up, and it has become so effective that basic fact-checking is taken as evidence of partisan bias. In the new politics, you don't even have to bother with a kernel of truth anymore. Why distort reality when you can simply make your own? And that's before getting to AI and its efficacy at producing mediocre papers."
"Before the last few years, the single greatest challenge of the class was usually unteaching much of what incoming students thought they knew. They had absorbed ideas from their parents, bosses and the culture at large, many of which were either false or misleading. (I can't count the number of times when, upon hearing that each state gets two senators, a student would say, "One from each party, right?")"
The formal structure of American government remains—the Electoral College and a bicameral Congress persist—but core democratic norms have weakened in practice. Checks and balances, judicial review, stare decisis, judicial independence, and the rule of law no longer reliably constrain or guide political behavior. Student misconceptions once stemmed from oversimplification and intuitive errors; now misinformation is industrialized and fact-checking is often dismissed as partisan. Political actors increasingly fabricate claims without needing a kernel of truth, while AI adds new challenges by producing substandard student work. These developments make teaching fundamental civic concepts considerably harder.
Read at Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs
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