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Friday, July 1st, 2022

Our Precarious Democracy
Extreme Polarization and Alienation in Our Politics

Author:    
Source:     Institute of Politics
Publication Date:     1 July 2022 (used)
Link: Our Precarious Democracy
Extreme Polarization and Alienation in Our Politics
Stephan:   Increasingly Americans are feeling overwhelmingly alienated from their government with a significant percentage expecting it to come to gun violence. Basically a new civil war. When you add that to what amounts to a second attempted coup, this by the Supreme Court with its recent decisions, and the Republican blockage of the Senate so that nothing gets done, and the cultivation by Republicans of the most radical MAGAt world morons, it becomes clear that for a host of reasons the United States is sliding into becoming a christofascist anocracy. When the citizens of a country turn against their government, no longer trust it, no longer feel they can rely on it, because the government has become dysfunctional history suggests you have a country sliding into authoritarian rule. It all hinges on the November election and I, frankly, do not think Americans are smart enough to understand the Democrats must be given a larger majority in each house. Not because the Democrats are perfect, or anything close to that, but they are the only party actually working to preserve democracy in America.

As Independence Day approaches, more than one in four Americans are so alienated from their
government that they believe it may “soon be necessary to take up arms” against it, according to a
new poll released Thursday by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP).
That startling finding, which comes in the midst of congressional hearings into the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was just one of several reflections of the dangerous level of estrangement many Americans feel from each other and our democratic institutions.

The survey of 1,000 registered voters, conducted last month by Republican pollster Neil Newhouse
and Democratic pollster Joel Benenson with input from students at the Institute of Politics (IOP), was designed to probe polarization and its relationship to the news sources upon which Americans rely in a fractionated media environment.

The portrait that it paints reveals not only the growing divides we have witnessed in recent years but
strong sentiments that the majority of media outlets contribute to these divisions by intentionally
misleading their audiences to promote a political point of view.

Among the poll’s findings:

» A majority […]

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