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03rd Jan 2022

US democracy ‘could collapse by 2025’, Canadian professor warns

Charlie Herbert

He said that the US could be under a rightwing dictatorship by the end of the decade

A Canadian professor has warned that US democracy could collapse “by 2025” and that Canada must prepare for this eventuality.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, founding director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, said that people should not rule out the possibility that the US could find itself under a rightwing dictatorship by 2030.

Homer-Dixon wrote in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail: “We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine.

“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.”

In a stark and bleak prediction, he continued: “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 rightwing dictatorship.”

The professor said that if Trump were to return to the White House in 2024, he would have just two objectives of “vindication and vengeance” over the idea that his 2020 defeat was because of electoral fraud.

Homer-Dixon warned that Canada is “woefully unprepared” for the “terrible storm coming from the south.”

After turning its attention inward he said Canada must “focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unraveling of democracy in the United States.”

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He went on to describe Trump as potentially being “just a warm-up act” for what may follow in a few years, writing: “Returning to office, he’ll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy but the process will produce a political and social shambles.

“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 even foresaw a scenario in which a Trump administration deliberately damaged Canada after having nullified all opposition within the US itself, asking: “What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country and the US regime demands them back. Do we comply?”