Canadian professor: US could be under right-wing dictator by 2030
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In an op-ed, a Canadian political scientist warns of Trump's threat to American democracy and its potential impact on its northern neighbor, Canada.
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The US could be under a right-wing dictator by 2030.
A Canadian professor of political science has warned that the United States could be ruled by a right-wing dictatorship by 2030, urging his country to guard against the "collapse of American democracy."
“We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine,” Thomas Homer-Dixon, Founding Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, wrote in the Globe and Mail.
“In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.”
The collapse of democracy
Homer-Dixon’s message was blunt, “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a rightwing dictatorship.”
The author posited scenarios centered on Trump's possible re-election in 2024, such as Republican-controlled state legislatures refusing to accept a Democratic victory.
Trump, he warned, “will have only two objectives, vindication and vengeance” of the lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.
A “scholar of violent conflict” for more than four decades, Homer-Dixon said Canada must take heed of the “unfolding crisis”.
He explained that over the past year, "we’ve turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of Covid-19, reconciliation, and the accelerating effects of climate change", adding that the focus should shift to solve the unraveling of democracy in the United States.
He believes that is done by fully recognizing the "magnitude of the danger." "If Trump is re-elected, even under the more optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable", he continued.
The northern border
Homer-Dixon predicted a scenario in which a new Trump administration, having effectively nullified internal opposition, deliberately damaged its northern neighbor.
“Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history. What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country and the US regime demands them back. Do we comply?”
Trump, he said, “may be just a warm-up act."
Homer-Dixon believes that if Trump returns to office, he’ll be the "wrecking ball that demolishes democracy but the process will produce political and social shambles.
“Still, through targeted harassment and dismissal, he’ll be able to thin the ranks of his movement’s opponents within the state, the bureaucrats, officials, and technocrats who oversee the non-partisan functioning of core institutions and abide by the rule of law."
“Then the stage will be set for a more managerially competent ruler, after Trump, to bring order to the chaos he’s created,” the Canadian professor concluded.
