On the condition our condition is in*

There's a trove of new U.S. attitudinal polling out there from PRRI titled Cultural Change and Anxiety in America. Now that's on point, for sure.

Many commentators are digesting bits of this and I'm sure I'll do my bit. But I want to start with a snippet of what Josh Marshall pulls out:

31% of Americans mostly or completely agree that the 2020 was stolen from Donald Trump. 68% of Republicans believe this.

11% of Democrats believe that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” 30% of Republicans believe this. 39% of people who believe the election was stolen from Trump believe this. 

Yes -- that does seem a prelude to "a gathering storm" -- Marshall's headline.

But I think if we're honest with ourselves, the crisis of electoral legitimacy this describes has been around for longer than we may hold in our consciousnesses. 

• If you'd polled me in the spring of 2001 asking whether I thought George W. Bush had been legitimately elected, I would have said NO. I remember well, on December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court awarded him the office in Bush v. Gore, saying to the activist board with which I was meeting: "Well, we've just had a coup." I didn't fully believe Bush II was a legitimate president until he won in 2004.

• If you'd polled me in spring of 2017, asking whether Donald Trump was legitimately elected, I'd have said I had doubts. I didn't exactly think Putin's minions had cooked the results, but illicit foreign interference for the benefit of the Orange Scumbag hung over the election, to my way of thinking.

Neither of these two GOPers was "my president." I also didn't feel that violence was the only remedy for manifest electoral miscarriages. But to what extent was that not a consequence of democratic (small "d") virtue, but of powerlessness?

Now we've got a former guy who a lot of people think was robbed -- and who has incited and delights in violence if he can get other people to do the dirty work. This is appropriately terrifying. The Washington Post investigation of the 1/6 coup attempt is long -- but necessary reading.

Meanwhile the Wapo's Philip Bump has summarized the PRRI findings as well as the paper's additional polling from Marist. We all think the other side threatens democracy.

Click to enlarge.

Weave all of this together, and the picture that results is a bifurcated sense of the threat America faces. That’s reflected in another question asked by Marist: Which party poses the bigger threat to democracy in the United States? Democrats say Republicans, and Republicans say Democrats. Independents blame both parties equally.

I'm a good progressive partisan and the notion that Joe Biden threatens democracy seems hogwash to me -- but that's where we are. And I'm just glad there seem to still be marginally more of us.

Marshall also pulled out of the PRRI findings that:

55% of independents think “the Republican party has been taken over by racists”. 51% of all Americans believe this.

It might be more accurate to say that white America has always been racist -- but at least the Dems have changed enough, intellectually and demographically, to know we should not be.

* Blame my age and The First Edition for the headline.