![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
-- Thomas Homer-Dixon,
"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 right-wing dictatorship.
"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.
"Leading American academics are now actively addressing the prospect of a fatal weakening of U.S. democracy.
[...]
"Democracy is an institution, but underpinning that institution is a vital set of beliefs and values. If a substantial enough fraction of a population no longer holds those beliefs and values, then democracy can't survive. Probably the most important is recognition of the equality of the polity's citizens in deciding its future; a close runner up is willingness to concede power to one's political opponents, should those equal citizens decide that's what they want. At the heart of the ideological narrative of U.S. right-wing demagogues, from Mr. Trump on down, is the implication that large segments of the country's population - mainly the non-white, non-Christian, and educated urban ones - aren't really equal citizens. They aren't quite full Americans, or even real Americans."
"The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare", The Globe and Mail, 2021-12-31
(no subject)
"Even in the Weimar Republic, the vote for the National Socialists was closely correlated with the unemployment rate. The Nazis were in trouble (with their share of the vote falling and the party beset by internal disputes) as late as 1927, before the German economy started to contract. Then, of course, the Depression hit."
No Dictatorship without a Depression first. Therefore, to ensure a Dictatorship on their terms, the fascists need to crash the stock markets.
And if it comes to that, NORAD will have to be dead for Canada. NATO will be problematic, if still viable as an extension of the EU rather than of US policy. And the EU will be Canada's best chance of holding onto whatever we still can of our own sovereignty.
(no subject)
(no subject)
*takes notes*
(no subject)