Nearly a quarter of Americans (23%) agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” according to the survey. This is up from 15% in 2021.

In a statement, PRRI researchers say they have asked about this in “eight separate surveys since March 2021.” They said that “this is the first time support for political violence has peaked above 20%” in their survey results.

While Americans across the political spectrum feel democracy is at risk next year, support for political violence runs mostly along party lines.

Currently one-third of Republicans support violence as a means to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats, the survey found. More specifically, Republicans who have favorable views of Donald Trump were found to be “nearly three times as likely as Republicans who have unfavorable views of Trump” to support political violence.

Compared to past surveys, researchers also found an uptick in support for conspiracy theories among Americans — specifically QAnon. According to PRRI, there has been a significant increase in “QAnon believers (from 14% to 23%),” as well as a “a decrease in QAnon rejecters,” since 2021. However, Republicans are still twice as likely as Democrats to agree with the core beliefs of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

  • thantik@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I’m one of those who votes for Democrats, but increasingly want to see violence against our politicians, supreme court justices, and others who are not following the will of the people.

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      Unfortunately this doesn’t work in practice. Sporadic murders of high profile politicians end up causing a lot of fear and galvanizing public sentiment towards tough-on-crime and other fascist leaders. A wide-scale revolution is almost always co-opted by a strong, militant group that seeks to establish an autocracy afterwards. Often they are bankrolling the revolution. And if they don’t exist at the time of revolution, it is inevitable they pop up to seize control afterwards.

      Also, this is essentially Republicans’ plans: Project 2025

      Project 2025 is a plan to reshape the Executive Branch of the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 United States presidential election.[1][2] Established in 2022, the project seeks to recruit thousands to come to Washington, D.C., to replace existing employees to restructure the Executive Branch of the federal government as to further the agenda and policies of Donald Trump.[3] The plan would perform a quick takeover of the entire U.S. federal government under a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory – a theory proposing the president of the United States have absolute power of the executive branch – upon inauguration.

      I.e. a coup.

      • Narrrz@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        Unfortunately this doesn’t work in practice. Sporadic murders of high profile politicians end up causing a lot of fear and galvanizing public sentiment towards tough-on-crime and other fascist leaders. A wide-scale revolution is almost always co-opted by a strong, militant group that seeks to establish an autocracy afterwards. Often they are bankrolling the revolution. And if they don’t exist at the time of revolution, it is inevitable they pop up to seize control afterwards

        so then wth are we supposed to do to fight against the descent into fascism?

        • Neato@kbin.social
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          8 months ago

          Vote, organize, protest (not entirely legally). If a country falls to fascism or is getting close, there might not be enough the populace can do to stop it or resist. Both examples of Fascist Italy and Germany required outside intervention. We see a LOT of authoritarian countries with little chance at them getting out of it themselves.

          Fighting a fascist country is mostly just playing into their hands. You need an organized resistance ready to setup a government that isn’t just another authoritarian powerbase. Which is a tall order.

          The real way to stop fascism: kill it in the cradle. Don’t let it get to the point where a president or chancellor is executing the legislature and taking supreme executive authority.

          • PowerCrazy
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            8 months ago

            A good way to stop fascism, is to stop voting for “lesser of two evils.” Since that ensures every election creeps closer to fascism.

            • smrtprts@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              What do you propose then? The way our system is, there are really only 2 choices.

              • PowerCrazy
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                8 months ago

                In a first past the post system, there can only be two parties, this is true. However it doesn’t have to be these two Fascist Capitalist parties. Of course voting by itself does almost nothing, but refusing to vote for the two parties of Capital is the absolute least you can do. Who you choose to vote for as long as it is not the two parties of Capital is up to you. If you want to do more, there are plenty of orgs you can get involved in to help build a parallel support structure. Just make sure they aren’t a non-profit, or a foundation led by some professional manager. If they are funded by a local government that’s decent, if they are funded by a co-op that self-funds some other way, that is even better. But all of them require more effort then voting blue.

                • ArumiOrnaught@kbin.social
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                  8 months ago

                  If you don’t vote then the politicians don’t care. They’ll see your ambivalence as a sign that you think things are fine. Also look more at local elections more than big ones. They help more than you think. Primaries are where you’re actually allow people left of 1980’s Republicans get elected. There have been elections where I’ve been one of the 10 people voting. It really isn’t hard to change elections if you’re doing it right.

                  Also aren’t most of the book burnings happening in multiple states because of just 10 people. Knowing how to vote and apply pressure is better than making some politician 20 minutes late because you pulled out a valve stem core.

            • Neato@kbin.social
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              8 months ago

              Then you split the party vote and fascists win. That’s how party politics work. You need to primary better candidates.

              • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆M
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                8 months ago

                It’s also dangerous to think that such right wing movement can be stopped simply by voting. German nazis never won more than 37% of the vote while there were still democratic elections in place. Once these people get in power the mask comes off. Republicans were seriously considering similar tactics during last elections, and I’m sure we’ll see that happen again going forward.

                First chapter in Blackshirts and Reds discusses the rise of fascists in Italy and nazis in Germany, and it’s hard not to draw parallels with what we’re seeing currently happen in US and Canada:

                After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamen­tary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.

                To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut - measures that might sound familiar to us today. But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921 , many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boy­cotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.

                To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

                In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi­ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”- really a coup d’etat - took place.

                In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

                During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown­ shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con­cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener­ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

                In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour­geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.

        • PowerCrazy
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          8 months ago

          Damn that would be fucked up, could you imagine, the President of the united states, who according to the US constitution is literally the absolute power of the executive branch of government, and actually used that power? Wow. What a crazy world that would be.

  • athos77@kbin.social
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    8 months ago

    true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country

    Gee, I wonder where their loyalties lie …

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Currently one-third of Republicans support violence as a means to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats, the survey found. More specifically, Republicans who have favorable views of Donald Trump were found to be “nearly three times as likely as Republicans who have unfavorable views of Trump” to support political violence.

    So…

    33% of republicans… and a much larger % of trump supporters?

    And 13% of Dems, it’s assume that 13% mean they won’t resign themselves to peaceful protest if trump successfully steals the election.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      13% recognizing the potential need for self-defense against Trump’s jackbooted thugs.

  • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Republicans are still twice as likely as Democrats to agree with the core beliefs of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

    Wut? There are people who believe that the democrats are all satanic pedophiles who are still registered democrat?

  • TheJims@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    When lying cheating and stealing doesn’t work, it’s a natural progression

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆M
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    8 months ago

    A political system is a social contract that requires people to believe that the system is fundamentally fair. Once sufficient numbers of people become convinced that the system is rigged and it’s not working in their interest then all bets are off.

    Cults like QAnon and opportunists like Trump didn’t just appear out of nowhere. The difference is that increasing numbers of people are seeing their material conditions deteriorate having lived through three major crashes in as many decades. People are increasingly coming to understand that the system is not working in their interest. However, they lack political education to understand what the actual problems are, and so they flock to whoever is openly saying that the system is broken because that’s one truth they’ve come to believe.

    As material conditions continue to decline in US, more and more political radicalization will occur and eventually violence will erupt.

    • Unaware7013@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      Because its easier to believe there’s a vast conspiracy out in the world that’s wrecking your life than it is to admit your choices and personality make people not want to interact with you IRL, so the only real human interaction you get is with other crazy people on line that form an echo chamber and allow you to feel like you have some kind of power or insight into the randomness that is life.

  • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    The thing that keeps my hopes up is the knowledge that the far right is so unreality-poisoned that they all wanna be the protagonist. They backstab each other over the pettiest shit, I honestly don’t know if they could be formed into a united front even if someone at an agency was to hit the GLADIO button.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Democrats were more likely to hold this view with 84% support, but supermajorities of Republicans and independent voters said they also agreed with that statement.

    “I think the temperature is high and people feel the sense that the guardrails are down,” Jones explained.

    Currently one-third of Republicans support violence as a means to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats, the survey found.

    Compared to past surveys, researchers also found an uptick in support for conspiracy theories among Americans — specifically QAnon.

    The survey found that an overwhelming majority of Americans (94%) agree that “we should teach our children both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past,” compared with just 4% who agree that “we should not teach children history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past.”

    The survey also found that a majority of Americans trust public school teachers to select appropriate curriculum and they oppose the banning of books that discuss slavery.


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