Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon warned that the United States could be ruled by a right-wing dictatorship by 2030, “if not sooner.”
Former President Donald Trump could be “just a warm-up act,” the founding director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia wrote in a Globe and Mail op-ed published last week.
Trump could return to the White House and serve as “the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy” to produce “a political and social shambles,” Homer-Dixon wrote. That would set the stage “for a more managerially competent ruler” to “bring order to the chaos he’s created,” he added.
“We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine,” the political scientist continued. “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.”
Homer-Dixon, a “scholar of violent conflict” for more than four decades, warned in his essay that Canada is “woefully unprepared” for the “terrible storm” that “is coming from the south,” having “turned our attention inward” during the coronavirus pandemic.
“But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unraveling of democracy in the United States,” he wrote. “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.”