Just in case you were worried that things might be calming down and getting back to “normal” again, the latest poll from AP-NORC should disabuse you of that notion. The survey asked respondents a series of questions on the generic topic of “how well democracy is working” in America, along with how well Congress is representing the country’s values and if our laws and our courts uphold what Americans want. As with most surveys, there were some disagreements across the board, but the bottom line is pretty clear. Barely one in ten Americans believe that “democracy is working” in the United States. and few think that the government is doing a good job. Raise your hand if you find any of this surprising under the current conditions.

Only about 1 in 10 U.S. adults give high ratings to the way democracy is working in the United States or how well it represents the interests of most Americans, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Majorities of adults say U.S. laws and policies do a poor job of representing what most Americans want on issues ranging from the economy and government spending to gun policy, immigration and abortion. The poll shows 53% say Congress is doing a bad job of upholding democratic values, compared with just 16% who say it’s doing a good job.

The findings illustrate widespread political alienation as a polarized country limps out of the pandemic and into a recovery haunted by inflation and fears of a recession. In interviews, respondents worried less about the machinery of democracy — voting laws and the tabulation of ballots — and more about the outputs.

I’ll address a few of the specific issues I have with a survey such as this in a moment, but the overall conclusion we can draw from this poll is relatively basic. People are likely to say that “democracy isn’t working in America” when what they really mean is that “things aren’t going the way I want them to.” Americans love to complain (as is our right) and we do a lot of it.

But in recent days, both the legacy media and both parties in Washington have trained Americans to view everything as a “crisis of democracy.” We are constantly assured that “our democracy is under attack” if a court ruling doesn’t go the way someone likes or if Congress passes or fails to pass some piece of legislation that someone finds particularly important. Meanwhile, an actual crisis of democracy such as our system of justice breaking down into a partisan circus goes largely ignored.

The results of this poll were also likely very sketchy because so many people have only a vague idea of what “democracy” actually means. America is actually a federal constitutional republic, which is similar, but not entirely the same thing. Of course, since we apparently don’t teach civics in high school anymore, that fact is falling into the category of forbidden knowledge. There haven’t been many pure democracies on this globe since the early days of Greek society. And in reality, a pure democracy quickly becomes untenable when you start dealing with more people than you can comfortably fit in one auditorium at a time.

That fact was exemplified in an interview the AP conducted with Michael Brown, a poll respondent from Connecticut who is disappointed in the current state of democracy. He told an interviewer that he “has seen the United States falling short of its democratic promise ever since learning that the Electoral College allows someone to become president while not winning the majority of national votes.” In a stateless nation attempting to operate a pure democracy, the person who wins the raw majority of the votes (the “popular vote” winner) would be declared the victor. But that’s not how America was created. We’re a nation of states that are, well… united. And the relative influence of each of the states is gauged based on its population. Often the popular vote winner is also the final victor, but not always. And that’s exactly how the system was designed. So if you cite this as the reason “democracy isn’t working,” you really aren’t grasping how the underlying structure operates.

I’ve traditionally been rather sanguine about whether things are “going my way” in the country over the more than six decades that I’ve been hanging around. You win some and you lose some. As long as the voice of both the majority and the minority on any given issue is being heard, we’ll probably keep stumbling along and surviving. Of course, it’s 2023 and I’ve become increasingly unsure of that these days. That doesn’t mean that “democracy is failing.” But it does appear that a lot of the people doing both the voting and the representing are growing increasingly deranged. The world is going crazy in many ways, and I don’t know if any amount of “democracy” can fix crazy.