One in five adults in the US, equivalent to about 50 million people, believe that political violence is justified at least in some circumstances, a new mega-survey has found.
A team of medical and public health scientists at the University of California, Davis enlisted the opinions of almost 9,000 people across the US to explore how far willingness to engage in political violence goes.
They discovered that mistrust and alienation from democratic institutions have reached such a peak that substantial minorities of people in the US now endorse violence as a means to political ends.
“The prospect of large-scale violence in the near future is entirely plausible,” the scientists said.
About 3 percent — or by extrapolation, 7 million people — believe that political violence is usually or always justified, the study showed.
Almost one in four of the respondents — equivalent to more than 60 million people — could conceive of violence being justified “to preserve an American way of life based on Western European traditions,” it said.
Most alarmingly, 7.1 percent said that they would be willing to kill a person to advance an important political goal.
The researchers said that, extrapolated to US society, that is the equivalent of 18 million people.
The study, Views of American Democracy and Society and Support for Political Violence, was led by Garen Wintemute, Sonia Robinson and Andrew Crawford, and was published on the preprint server MedRxiv on Friday last week.
Over three weeks beginning on May 3, the researchers gathered the views of a representative sample of 8,620 people nationwide.
The scientists set out to discover just how open individuals are to engaging in political violence.
The study uncovered signs of discontent and deep unease just beneath the surface of US society.
More than two-thirds of the respondents said they feared that the country was facing “a serious threat to democracy.”
Just over half of the sample group — 50.1 percent — agreed with the contention that in the next few years the US would confront another civil war.
With such jitters at record levels, the survey findings point to areas of confusion within the US public realm.
Eighty-nine percent of respondents said it is very or extremely important that the US remains a democracy, yet the survey also recorded that 42 percent agreed that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.”
When asked whether the 2020 election was stolen from then-US president Donald Trump, and if Joe Biden is an illegitimate president, the weighted percentages in the 95 percent confidence interval were 66.2 percent for “do not agree,” or the equivalent of 171.1 million people, 13.7 percent for “somewhat agree” (35.4 million people) 5.9 percent for “strongly agree” (15.3 million) and 12.5 percent for “very strongly agree” (32.2 million), while 1.7 percent had no response.
Some respondents expressed willingness to carry out specific acts of violence in the pursuit of political objectives.
When asked about their “willingness to engage in specific forms of political violence” more than 12 percent of respondents said that “in a situation where you think force or violence is justified to advance an important political objective” they would be at least “somewhat willing” to “threaten or intimidate a person,” while the total to “injure a person” was about 10 percent.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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