By 2025, the United States’ democracy could collapse, resulting in severe domestic political instability, as well as extensive public unrest.
The country could fall under the right-wing dictatorship’s authority by 2030, if not sooner, a Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon has warned.
In an op-ed for The Globe and Mail titled: “The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare,” Homer-Dixon emphasizes the country is becoming “increasingly ungoverned.” If it continues on its current path, it will “descend into civil war.”
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He added: we cannot rule out these possibilities simply because they seem implausible or too horrific to contemplate. In 2014, the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president would have struck nearly everyone as ludicrous as well. However, we now live in a society in which the absurd frequently becomes true and the heinous becomes routine.
The “warning signals”
According to Homer-Dixon, if Trump were to reclaim the White House, he would have “just two objectives: vindication and vengeance.” He cautioned that Canada has been focusing on other matters such as COVID-19 and climate change and is, therefore “unprepared” for a “big storm” from the US in the case of Trump’s reelection.
Trumpism, he warned, is beginning to resemble European fascism in its “contempt for the rule of law and exaltation of violence,” but Trump may be “merely a warm-up act” for what is to come.
If Trump seeks re-election in 2024 and is re-elected, “he will be the wrecking ball that destroys democracy, but in the process, he will create political and social shambles,” Homer-Dixon wrote. “However, he will be able to thin the ranks of his movement’s opponents within the state, the bureaucrats, officials, and technocrats who monitor the nonpartisan operation of basic institutions and adherence to the rule of law.
“Then, following Mr. Trump, the stage will be set for a more managerially capable ruler to restore order to the mess he has caused.”
Homer Dixon’s op-ed echoes a report by the Stockholm-based Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). The United States was labeled a “backsliding democracy” in IDEA’s “Global State of Democracy Report 2021.”
“Notably, the United States, the stronghold of global democracy, succumbed to authoritarian impulses and fell a substantial number of democratic steps,” the think tank noted in its annual report.
