WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- 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.
“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.”
The 75-year-old former president has frequently hinted that he plans to run for the White House again in 2024.
Homer Dixon wrote that, as a scholar of violent conflict for more than 40 years, and having written about social breakdown and genocide, the warning signs are obvious.
“We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine,” he wrote.
“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.”
Trump’s return to the White House might be just the starting point.
“Returning to office, he’ll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy but the process will produce a political and social shambles,” Homer-Dixon said.
“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 Mr Trump, to bring order to the chaos he’s created.”
He added that analysts he consulted offered a number of possible models: “Viktor Orban’s Hungary, with its coercive legal apparatus of ‘illiberal democracy’; Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, with its chronic social distemper and administrative dysfunction; or Vladimir Putin’s Russia with its harsh one-man hyper-nationalist autocracy.”
As if on cue, Trump published a statement on Monday endorsing Orban’s campaign for reelection. “Viktor Orban of Hungary truly loves his Country and wants safety for his people,” he said.
“He has done a powerful and wonderful job in protecting Hungary, stopping illegal immigration, creating jobs, trade, and should be allowed to continue to do so in the upcoming election.”
At the same time, a new poll revealed the extent to which Americans’ faith in democratic institutions had eroded.
About a third of voters said violence against the government could be justified, according to the Washington Post- University of Maryland’s survey, published at the weekend.
The poll, taken between December 19 and December 19, asks U.S. adults: “Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to take violent action against the government, or is it never justified?”
Thirty-four percent of respondents said it could be, while 62 percent believe it is never justified.
Homer-Dixon concluded that the result in America was a possible lurch towards fascism.
“And it’s not inaccurate to use the F word. As conservative commentator David Frum argues, Trumpism increasingly resembles European fascism in its contempt for the rule of law and glorification of violence,” he said.
“Evidence is as close as the latest right-wing Twitter meme: widely circulated holiday photos show Republican politicians and their family members, including young children, sitting in front of their Christmas trees, all smiling gleefully while cradling pistols, shotguns and assault rifles.
“Those guns are more than symbols. The Trump cult presents itself as the only truly patriotic party able to defend U.S. values and history against traitorous Democrats beholden to cosmopolitan elites and minorities who neither understand nor support ‘true’ American values.
“The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. capitol must be understood in these terms. The people involved didn’t think they were attacking U.S. democracy – although they unquestionably were. Instead, they believed their “patriotic” actions were needed to save it.”