“What people mean by ‘democracy’ is pretty fuzzy,” she says. politics today-can often distort attitudes.
She is less alarmed by the shaky support for democracy, noting that political gridlock-as in U.S. “So the fact that you’re getting these high numbers … is really quite concerning.” The sample does slightly overrepresent older people, who are not known to commit much violence worldwide, she says. Kleinfeld says the study’s findings are compelling because of the large number of participants and because it asked about specific scenarios in which participants think violence is justified-such as for self-defense or to stop people with different political beliefs from voting. adults-said they would be willing to kill a person in such a situation. About 7% of participants-which would correspond to about 18 million U.S. If found in a situation where they think violence is justified to advance an important political objective, about one in five respondents thinks they will likely be armed with a gun. (The survey didn’t specify when.) “The fact that basically half the country is expecting a civil war is just chilling,” Wintemute says. Half expect a civil war in the United States in the next few years. The team then applied statistical methods to extrapolate the survey results to the entire country.Īlthough almost all respondents thought it’s important for the United States to remain a democracy, about 40% said having a strong leader is more important. The respondents were part of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel-an online research panel that has been used widely, including by Wintemute for research on violence and firearm ownership. society, and their own attitudes toward political violence. He and his colleagues surveyed more than 8600 adults in English and Spanish about their views on democracy in the United States, racial attitudes in U.S. “Sometimes being an ER doc is like being the bowman on the Titanic going, ‘Look at that iceberg!’” he says.
Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician and longtime gun violence researcher at the University of California, Davis, wondered what those trends portend for civil unrest. “But it should be shocking.”įirearm deaths in the United States grew by nearly 43% between 20, and gun sales surged during the coronavirus pandemic. “This is not a study that’s meant to shock,” says Rachel Kleinfeld, a political violence expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who was not involved in the research. Nearly half expect a civil war, and many say they would trade democracy for a strong leader, a preprint posted today on medRxiv found. Now, a large study confirms one in five Americans believes violence motivated by political reasons is-at least sometimes-justified. Violence can seem to be everywhere in the United States, and political violence is in the spotlight, with the 6 January 2021 insurrection as exhibit A.
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