The single greatest threat to America is hiding in plain sight  Opinion by Jonathan Turley• 8h    FOX News

A startling poll was released last week showing that a majority of voters not only view the opposing party as a threat to the nation but justifying violence to combat their agenda. The poll captures a crisis of faith that I have been writing about for over a decade as an academic and a commentator. Many now question democracy as a sustainable system of government. It represents the single greatest threat to this nation: a citizenry that has lost faith not just with our system of government but with each other.

The polls by the University of Virginia Center for Politics shows a nation at war with itself. Fifty-two percent of Biden supporters say Republicans are now a threat to American life while 47 percent of Trump supporters say the same about Democrats.

Among Biden supporters, 41 percent now believe violence is justified "to stop [Republicans] from achieving their goals." An almost identical percentage, 38 percent, of Trump supporters now embrace violence to stop Democrats.

Not surprisingly, many of these people have lost faith in democracy. Some 31 percent of Trump supporters believe that the nation should explore alternative forms of government. Roughly a quarter (24 percent) of Biden supporters also question the viability of democracy.

Faith is the one thing that no system of government can do without. Without faith in the underlying values of a constitutional system, authority rests on a mix of coercion and capitulation.

For years, I have written about this growing loss of faith and how it has been fueled by our intellectual and political elites. In the echo chamber of news and social media, citizens constantly hear how the opposing party is composed of "traitors" and how the constitutional system works to protect enemies of the people.

Viewers now get a steady diet of figures like MSNBC commentator Elie Mystal who called the U.S. Constitution "trash" and argued that we should simply just dump it.

In a New York Times column, "The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed," law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the Constitution to be "radically altered" to "reclaim America from constitutionalism."

READ MORE HERE