It should be noted that it is strange and unprecedented to expect everyone to be politically literate. It is an understandable expectation, given that we live in nominal "liberal democracies", where the "informed choice" and "agency" of voters is indispensable for political health, but historically I doubt you could find mass political literacy in any normal era. Ultimately, the Spanish-American war is irrelevant even to most historians, put aside the general public taken as a whole - it is the same with politics. People's lives rarely revolve around politics, it is just not something they have an interest in. The problem is that under the current system, each citizen faces the choice of either being a political expert or being exploited by one. Not to mention that the sheer volume of information necessary for a voter to make a fully informed choice in a modern state probably exceeds the mental capacity of any single given individual. The kind of data point based choice which liberal democracy affirms as its ideal and mandates for every single person is probably unattainable even for a highly dedicated, educated genius.