“Republicans (30%) are approximately three times as likely as Democrats (11%) to agree with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Agreement with this statement rises to 40% among Republicans who most trust far-right news sources and is 32% among those who most trust Fox News. One in four white evangelicals (26%) also agree that political violence may be necessary to save the country”
Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.
Might not support any kind of uprising. They may be thinking of using violence to defend against an uprising from the other side, or even against a foreign aggressor.
Like, I think of “support for a violent uprising” as being something like “the country is fucked and we need to use violence to make it better”. But someone answering yes to that question might be more like “the country is pretty okay but we might need to use violence to keep it that way”.
This was in the answer section for a while, and I deleted it for that reason. Then it was moved to the comments section, and it seems like an admin might have moved it. Note to lesswrong devs:
It’d be nice if I could do that myself.
The delete reasons should probably show up on answers like they do comments.
In case you didn’t notice, the phrasing (“true American patriots”, “gotten so far off track”) is engineered to give the discrepancy highlighted found in the press release. The survey itself is interesting but it’s propaganda.
Even the political party which would be disincentivized by the phrasing to answer “yes” to the above question answered with a 11% positive rate. If we accept the discrepancy of the results being purely because of the engineered phrasing, then we have at least 22% of the population agreeing with committing violence in order to preserve their notion of what this country ought to be.
This is an isolated demand for rigor. Your post uses a tweet and your personal feelings as evidence for the fact that “perhaps 1-5%” of the population supports a communist violent revolt. Is your post propaganda because it only focuses on the fears of a left-wing revolt and not a right-wing one? It was likely influenced to be that way because that’s what you legitimately fear and are concerned about, and you’re trying to convince others of your opinion. That’s fine; I have no reason to believe that this post contains anything other than your true belief. The people writing the above survey question may have also had similar fears about a right-wing revolt, and phrased a question in a way that makes it less than perfectly useful for this analysis.
I mostly agree, and that’s why I said the results were still interesting. In fact, both numbers should be lower bounds; it says at least that 33% of conservatives are willing to tell surveyors they’d support violence. I would crowdfund a study similarly phrased so that left-wing respondents can say yes; I could imagine it coming up with 15%, 40%, 30%, but I don’t really know and I think I would have probably undershot it a few days ago. If the left and the right are equally bellacostic, then that would mean we’d expect a third of the country to support violence, not a fifth.
Perhaps I’m being partial, but I don’t think I’m making an isolated demand for rigor. It’s not a general critique of the methods of scientific polling as much as punching in the effects of the wind. If you had said “I see Facebook posts by conservatives making similar threats all the time’ I wouldn’t have had a problem with that. On the other hand, if I had said something like “well, you need a meta-analysis of different results by different polling companies before you can make that claim”, then that would of course be unfair because I’d have no a priori expectation that the further evidence would move away from the already established conclusion. In this case however we do have the ability to conclude that the study is biased based on mechanical details, so we can and should adjust our GPS coordinates.
I do, by the way, totally believe conservatives on the whole are more willing to use violence, mostly because they have a self image as political underdogs who have been shut out of large institutions like Hollywood/News media/Education by elites and have “no other option”. I’m more scared of communists because I think their extremists are more capable, and that might reflect a bias on my part.
“Republicans (30%) are approximately three times as likely as Democrats (11%) to agree with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Agreement with this statement rises to 40% among Republicans who most trust far-right news sources and is 32% among those who most trust Fox News. One in four white evangelicals (26%) also agree that political violence may be necessary to save the country”
https://www.prri.org/press-release/competing-visions-of-america-an-evolving-identity-or-a-culture-under-attack/
It’s more than 1-5%; it’s a sizable minority.
Note that someone agreeing with
Might not support any kind of uprising. They may be thinking of using violence to defend against an uprising from the other side, or even against a foreign aggressor.
Like, I think of “support for a violent uprising” as being something like “the country is fucked and we need to use violence to make it better”. But someone answering yes to that question might be more like “the country is pretty okay but we might need to use violence to keep it that way”.
This was in the answer section for a while, and I deleted it for that reason. Then it was moved to the comments section, and it seems like an admin might have moved it. Note to lesswrong devs:
It’d be nice if I could do that myself.
The delete reasons should probably show up on answers like they do comments.
Yep, to both of those. Will see whether I can get around to fixing those.
In case you didn’t notice, the phrasing (“true American patriots”, “gotten so far off track”) is engineered to give the discrepancy highlighted found in the press release. The survey itself is interesting but it’s propaganda.
Even the political party which would be disincentivized by the phrasing to answer “yes” to the above question answered with a 11% positive rate. If we accept the discrepancy of the results being purely because of the engineered phrasing, then we have at least 22% of the population agreeing with committing violence in order to preserve their notion of what this country ought to be.
This is an isolated demand for rigor. Your post uses a tweet and your personal feelings as evidence for the fact that “perhaps 1-5%” of the population supports a communist violent revolt. Is your post propaganda because it only focuses on the fears of a left-wing revolt and not a right-wing one? It was likely influenced to be that way because that’s what you legitimately fear and are concerned about, and you’re trying to convince others of your opinion. That’s fine; I have no reason to believe that this post contains anything other than your true belief. The people writing the above survey question may have also had similar fears about a right-wing revolt, and phrased a question in a way that makes it less than perfectly useful for this analysis.
I mostly agree, and that’s why I said the results were still interesting. In fact, both numbers should be lower bounds; it says at least that 33% of conservatives are willing to tell surveyors they’d support violence. I would crowdfund a study similarly phrased so that left-wing respondents can say yes; I could imagine it coming up with 15%, 40%, 30%, but I don’t really know and I think I would have probably undershot it a few days ago. If the left and the right are equally bellacostic, then that would mean we’d expect a third of the country to support violence, not a fifth.
Perhaps I’m being partial, but I don’t think I’m making an isolated demand for rigor. It’s not a general critique of the methods of scientific polling as much as punching in the effects of the wind. If you had said “I see Facebook posts by conservatives making similar threats all the time’ I wouldn’t have had a problem with that. On the other hand, if I had said something like “well, you need a meta-analysis of different results by different polling companies before you can make that claim”, then that would of course be unfair because I’d have no a priori expectation that the further evidence would move away from the already established conclusion. In this case however we do have the ability to conclude that the study is biased based on mechanical details, so we can and should adjust our GPS coordinates.
I do, by the way, totally believe conservatives on the whole are more willing to use violence, mostly because they have a self image as political underdogs who have been shut out of large institutions like Hollywood/News media/Education by elites and have “no other option”. I’m more scared of communists because I think their extremists are more capable, and that might reflect a bias on my part.