Most Republicans in a January 2020 survey agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40 percent agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands. In both cases, most of the rest said they were unsure; only one in four or five disagreed.”
The strongest predictor of these anti-democratic views “by far,” according to Bartels,
is ethnic antagonism — especially concerns about the political power and claims on government resources of immigrants, African-Americans and Latinos. The corrosive impact of ethnic antagonism on Republicans’ commitment to democracy underlines the significance of ethnic conflict in contemporary U.S. politics.”