Canadian academic warns U.S. may slide into far-right dictatorship by 2030

The U.S. could come under a “rightwing dictatorship” by 2030, a Canadian professor has warned, calling on the Canadian leadership to shield the country from the “collapse of American democracy.”

In an article published in the Globe and Mail daily, British Columbia-based academic, Thomas Homer-Dixon, said the possibility of America’s descent into dictatorship “must not be dismissed” even if it “seems ludicrous or too horrible to imagine”.

“By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence, he wrote in the article.  “By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a rightwing dictatorship,” he added.

The academic said the election of former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2014 would also have “struck nearly everyone as absurd”, adding that we live in a world “where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.”

The founding director at the Royal Roads University’s Cascade Institute, cited eventualities centered on a Trump return to the White House in 2024 -- possibly including Republican-held state legislatures refusing to accept a Democratic win – to insist that Trump “will have only two objectives, vindication and vengeance” of the lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.

“Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals,” he underlined, while pointing to his credentials as “a scholar of violent conflict” who has studied “the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence and genocide” over the past 40 years.

“The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable, and some experts believe it could descend into civil war,” he added, emphasizing the need for his country to prepare for such an outcome.

“A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared,” Homer-Dixon wrote. “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 Canada 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,” he wrote in the article.

Homer-Dixon said he also sees a scenario in which a new Trump administration -- having effectively nullified internal opposition -- deliberately damaging its northern neighbor, while cautioning that Trump “could isolate Canada continentally.”

A resurgent Republican Party is strategizing to reclaim one, if not both, chambers of Congress in 2022, as Democrats struggle to deliver on an ambitious domestic agenda.

The article comes as the resurgent Republican Party in the U.S. is strategizing to reclaim both chambers of the Congress in 2022, even as the ruling Democrats struggle to deliver on an ambitious domestic agenda in the midst of deepening economic despair.

“Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history,” Homer-Dixon pointed out.  “What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country and the U.S. regime demands them back.  Do we comply?”

Trump and “a host of acolytes and wannabes such as Fox [News]’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia representative Majorie Taylor Greene,” Homer-Dixon noted, have transformed the Republican party “into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy.”

The Canadian academic also warned that a second Trump administration “may be just a warm-up act.”  “Returning to office, he’ll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy but the process will produce a political and social shambles,” Homer-Dixon emphasized.

“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,” he stated.  “Then the stage will be set for a more managerially competent ruler, after Mr. Trump, to bring order to the chaos he’s created.”