{"id":1703790,"date":"2022-10-20T07:41:10","date_gmt":"2022-10-20T11:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1703790"},"modified":"2022-10-20T12:04:19","modified_gmt":"2022-10-20T16:04:19","slug":"ben-shapiro-american-democracy-isnt-in-peril-so-long-as-americans-talk-to-each-other","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/ben-shapiro-american-democracy-isnt-in-peril-so-long-as-americans-talk-to-each-other\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Shapiro: American Democracy Isn&#8217;t in Peril &#8212; So Long as Americans Talk to Each Other"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">32<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fben-shapiro-american-democracy-isnt-in-peril-so-long-as-americans-talk-to-each-other%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1703790&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/ea801de8632db89efd3ca6d3db40151f2cf9597e.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>American democracy, we have been told, is in grave peril.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a perspective we hear echoed dozens of times per day in the mainstream media: If this next election doesn&#8217;t go precisely how our hallowed elitists desire, surely tyranny will follow. As one of those sagacious experts, MSNBC&#8217;s Joy Reid, recently put it on Twitter, &#8220;It&#8217;s terrifying how many Americans will choose literal fascism, female serfdom, climate collapse and the reversal of everything from Social Security &#038; Medicare to student loan relief bc they think giving Republicans the power to investigate Hunter Biden will bring down gas prices.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Polls show that this message has filtered down to many Americans, mostly Democrats. According to the latest New York Times\/Sienna poll, fully 11% of Democrats say &#8220;the state of our democracy&#8221; is the most important problem facing the country, compared with 17% who cite the economy and another 17% who cite inflation; 9% of independents feel the same way. More shocking, just 46% of Americans say that &#8220;America&#8217;s political system can still address the nation&#8217;s problems,&#8221; compared with 48% who say that the nation is &#8220;too divided politically to solve its problems.&#8221; And fully 74% of likely voters say American democracy is currently under threat.<\/p>\n<p>All of which imply we should be pretty damned worried about the state of the republic.<\/p>\n<p>And yet when we drill down, we see broad agreement among Americans that their neighbors aren&#8217;t their enemies; that our institutions are worth upholding; that the only remedy for our current political ills is to continue to work within the constitutional system. According to that same poll, just 20% of voters say they&#8217;ve had a disagreement with family or friends over politics that hurt their relationship; just 14% say that someone&#8217;s political views &#8220;tell you a lot about whether someone is a good person&#8221;; just 30% say that presidents should violate the laws to pursue &#8220;what they think is best.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Just 14% of likely voters say we will need to &#8220;go outside the law&#8221; to fix our democracy \u2014 16% of Democrats, 15% of independents and 9% of Republicans. Even among those who say we must &#8220;go outside the law,&#8221; just 12% say Americans should take up arms or participate in violence \u2014 meaning just 1.7% of likely voters advocate civil war. Meanwhile, 84% of likely voters say we can fix our democracy without destroying the system. <\/p>\n<p>As for the media&#8217;s favorite Trumpian conspiracy theory, QAnon, just 5% of likely voters call the theory believable. <\/p>\n<p>So, why precisely <i> are <\/i> so many Americans worried about the state of democracy? They&#8217;re worried that their political opponents will threaten the institutions they cherish. Forty-seven percent of voters declare former President Donald Trump a &#8220;major threat to democracy,&#8221; and 39% declare President Joe Biden to be the same. But shockingly, the institution they blame most for threatening democracy is the mainstream media, with 59% of likely voters, including 54% of independents, calling the mainstream media a &#8220;major threat to democracy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps that&#8217;s the biggest takeaway from all this data: that Americans don&#8217;t hate each other, but they&#8217;re being polarized by a media determined to divide them from one another, whipping up madness where mere concern would suffice. And what&#8217;s more, Americans can feel it. <\/p>\n<p>All of which means that sanity may reign once again, so long as Americans reconnect with each other rather than believing everything they see on the news. <\/p>\n<p>Ben Shapiro, 38, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of &#8220;The Ben Shapiro Show,&#8221; and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author; his latest book is &#8220;The Authoritarian Moment: How The Left Weaponized America&#8217;s Institutions Against Dissent.&#8221; To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.<\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"imageCaption\"><small>Photo credit: <a href=\"https:\/\/pixabay.com\/goto\/267948\/\" rel=\"external noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Ronile<\/a> at Pixabay<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>American democracy, we have been told, is in grave peril. It&#8217;s a perspective we hear echoed dozens of times per day in the mainstream media: If this next election doesn&#8217;t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1703794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[547],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1703790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bongino-report"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1703790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1703794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1703790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1703790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1703790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}