When it comes to American “democracy,” Pogo had it right: We have met the enemy and he is us.

For proof of this grim assessment, we need look no further than a recent poll by the Associated Press, whose headline reads, “Americans are widely pessimistic about democracy in the United States.”

It’s a republic, not a democracy.

When a polling organization starts with a flawed premise — in this case, that we govern ourselves by mob rule — we can be confident that the end product won’t be much better. And indeed, the AP poll says, “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.”

Imagine that. When the Left and its mainstream media water-carriers keep telling everyone that everything from Donald Trump to our Supreme Court is a “threat to our democracy,” people lose confidence in our “democracy.”

But what does this mean, exactly? Are the American people really upset about the way their government is serving them, or are they merely upset because they think their team is losing? Are they upset because Joe Biden couldn’t get his student loan debt forgiveness bribe through Congress, or because the Supreme Court made it academic? Because both of these things are signs of a healthy republic as opposed to an ailing democracy.

Or maybe the folks being polled are upset about high taxation and runaway debt and rampant crime and unchecked illegal immigration and overburdensome regulation. In each of these cases, they’re right to be unsatisfied with their government — whether they want to wrongly call it a democracy or rightly call it a republic.

The AP continues: “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.”

Again, what exactly are these “democratic values” that they speak of? Is rule of law a democratic value? Is equal justice under the law? Is free speech?

“The findings,” as the AP continues, “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.”

Did you catch that? According to the AP’s crack pollsters, we’re not too worried about the integrity of our voting system. But what did the same AP pollsters tell us just last week? This:

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds that only 22% of Republicans have high confidence that votes in the upcoming presidential election will be counted accurately compared to 71% of Democrats, underscoring a partisan divide fueled by a relentless campaign of lies related to the 2020 presidential election. Even as he runs for the White House a third time, Trump continues to promote the false claim that the election was stolen.

As we noted last week, that’s a stunning differential: One in five Republicans is confident in the current electoral system, while nearly three in four Democrats are. And why wouldn’t Democrats be so sanguine? The current system is working extraordinarily well for them.

But this week, says the AP, the American people aren’t concerned about our elections. They’re not concerned about our COVID-inspired bulk-mail balloting system, our Democrat-controlled voter rolls, our Zuckerbucks-funded ballot harvesting, our unmanned vote-collection boxes in deep-blue Democrat strongholds, and our laughably poor signature verification system.

No, we’re only concerned about our “democracy.” And the biggest threat to our democracy is … Donald Trump.

Get a load of this nasty little piece of partisan propaganda: “Karalyn Kiessling, a researcher at the University of Michigan who participated in the poll, sees troubling signs all around her. A Democrat, she recently moved to a conservative area outside the liberal campus hub of Ann Arbor, and worried that conspiracy theorists who believe former President Donald Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election would show up as poll watchers. Her Republican family members no longer identify with the party and are limiting their political engagement.”

Neither Karalyn Kiessling nor the AP wants to admit it, but Donald Trump isn’t the problem. Joe Biden is. He’s the president, and we’re feeling the consequences of his policies, not Donald Trump’s.

If we want to know why folks might be worried about “democracy,” perhaps we should consider a polling question that the AP didn’t ask, but the latest I&I/TIPP Poll did – namely, how many of us think our current president took bribes from foreign countries? While the Republican number, 80%, is predictable, a full 39% of Democrats believe the allegations about Biden having sold his country down the river.

Somehow, we elected this decrepit and deeply compromised man as president, and that’s on us. That’s our fault as Americans. But let’s end on a brighter note.

“The greatness of America,” said Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who knew us best, “lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

He was right then about fixing our faults. The question is: Is he right now? We’ll get a sense of that next November.