WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- Former President Jimmy Carter has warned that democracy is being threatened throughout the U.S., cautioning that “our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss.”
Carter, writing in a New York Times op-ed published on the eve of the anniversary of the January 6 unrest, charged that “without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy.”
“Americans,” the 97-year-old former president said, “must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.”
Carter said he had hope that the deadly attack on the Capitol “would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy.”
But politicians, he said, “have leveraged the distrust they have created to enact laws that empower partisan legislatures to intervene in election processes” and “seek to win by any means, and many Americans are being persuaded to think and act likewise, threatening to collapse the foundations of our security and democracy with breathtaking speed.”
The U.S. could be under the rule of a rightwing dictatorship by the end of the decade, according to a Canadian professor of politics, who is calling upon his own government to prepare for the collapse of American democracy.
Thomas Homer-Dixon centers his warning on the idea of Donald Trump running again in 2024 and Republican-held legislatures refusing to accept a Democratic victory.
“By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,” Homer-Dixon, director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, wrote in the Globe and Mail this week.
“By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.”
Homer-Dixon referenced Fox News, fringe Republicans such Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who has spread conspiracy theories and was permanently banned from Twitter at the weekend, and the widespread available of guns in America as evidence.
“A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. 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,” he said.
“But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unraveling of democracy in the United States. We need to start by fully recognizing the magnitude of the danger.
“If Mr Trump is re-elected, even under the more optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable.”