As mistrust and alienation from democratic institutions peaks, researchers explore how willing Americans are to commit violence
One in five adults in the United States, equivalent to about 50 million people, believe that political violence is justified at least in some circumstances, a new mega-survey has found.
Most alarmingly, 7.1% said that they would be willing to kill a person to advance an important political goal. The UC Davis team points out that, extrapolated to US society at large, that is the equivalent of 18 million Americans., was led by Garen Wintemute, Sonia Robinson and Andrew Crawford and has been published on the preprint server MedRxiv. Over three weeks beginning on 3 May, the UC Davis researchers gathered the views of a representative sample of 8,620 people nationwide.
Founder of the citizen militia group known as the Oath Keepers, speaks during a rally outside the White House in 2017.Against this backdrop, the study uncovers disturbing signs of seething discontent and deep unease just beneath the surface of US society. More than two-thirds of the respondents said that they feared that the country was facing “a serious threat to democracy”.
Yet the survey also recorded a seemingly contradictory result – 42% agreed that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy”.