A sobering (but not surprising) read; an excerpt:
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 right-wing dictatorship....
I’m a scholar of violent conflict. For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.
Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals.
I’m not surprised by what’s happening there – not at all. During my graduate work in the United States in the 1980s, I sometimes listened to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host and later television personality. I remarked to friends at the time that, with each broadcast, it was if Mr. Limbaugh were wedging the sharp end of a chisel into a faint crack in the moral authority of U.S. political institutions, and then slamming the other end of that chisel with a hammer.
In the decades since, week after week, year after year, Mr. Limbaugh and his fellow travellers have hammered away – their blows’ power lately amplified through social media and outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax. The cracks have steadily widened, ramified, connected and propagated deeply into America’s once-esteemed institutions, profoundly compromising their structural integrity. The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war.
Clearly the situation is bad in the Benighted States of America, although the country is too big, and power too diffuse due to the division of power between the federal government and the states, for a genuine federal dictatorship to be possible. The potential for Presidential elections to become meaningless is real enough, and the potential for incidents of civil violence (like the stormtrooper riot at the Capitol last January 6) is also real. Much will turn, in a moment of crisis, on the U.S. military, as we have noted before.
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