I do tend to think that people project their own views onto the world:
The US could be under a rightwing dictatorship by 2030, a Canadian political science professor has warned, urging his country to protect itself against the “collapse of American democracy”.
“We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine,” Thomas Homer-Dixon, founding director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, wrote in the Globe and Mail.
“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’s message was blunt: “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 patterns are in the head rather than actually existing out there.
Another way to explain this same phenomenon of the coming ultra-right wing populist fascism.
So, here we are all we good and woke. We’ve devoted our lives to the long march through the institutions and we’ve won. There’s nowhere in polite society that markets, let alone capitalism, can get a good word in edgeways.
Whaddayamean the people get to vote on this shit? We won and that’s that, we’re not going to allow the 60% of the country that’s rednecks overturn the victory.
I wish I could say that I didn’t in part believe in that last explanation.
From Canada, where Trudeau just asked on TV how long they should continue tolerating “the unvaccinated”, who are all misogynists and racists.
The US is the only place currently where any of the self-correction checks and balances actually work at all. If the corrections tend to be over-corrections that’s because the parties put up pugilistic morons like Trump and senile delusional old folk like Biden rather than anyone who might actually be any good.
I personally can’t wait for President De Santis. I know he will be a disappointment because they all are, but the let down will be from a vastly higher level than any recent president.
I wonder. What will it take to cause a seccessionist movement? A lot of this Covid nonsense and federal mismanagement certainly seems to have stoked that particular fire. Moreover if the Dems continue on their path of trying to eradicate opposition by using show trials and calling demonstrators “domestic terrorists, someone/group might actually decide to take them at their word.
I lived in the US in 2016. Obama lost the presidency and Trump got it. No disaster ensued. Life wasn’t much different. Trump had four years and didn’t impose a dictatorship. Was obnoxious but didn’t really do anything very bad. The problem here is the disconnect between what right-tending people really think vs what the think we think. They think we’re evil. They think we know what is good (their own worldview being incontrovertibly correct) but we work against it through greed and cruelty.
@rhoda klapp – January 3, 2022 at 10:44 am
Trump had four years and didn’t impose a dictatorship. Was obnoxious but didn’t really do anything very bad.
I got the impression (being in the UK) that a lot of Trump’s “obnoxiousness” was merely an artifact of the ludicrously aggressive bias shown against him by the MSM, they literally never reported anything in his favour – despite the fact that it would appear that he did more to improve conditions and chances for blacks and working-people in four years than Obama managed in eight. And that was achieved in the face of near-total opposition from “the machinery of state”.
BJ, your assessment is accurate.
A refusal to move the continuum “center” far to the left is now a sign of a far-right dictatorship.
(Trump was a Democrat for far longer than he was a Republican, and he was never further right than very close to centrist. They’re going to be very surprised when we do eventually elect someone on the right.)
. . . because the parties put up pugilistic morons like Trump . . .
Don’t confuse your level of dislike for Trump with the level of his intelligence.
And the idea the Republican party put Trump up is hilarious; he waded in there and earned the candidature directly from the primary voters. The party machine would have put forward Jeb Bush (who would have lost politely to Hilary Clinton).
The Democrats sidestepped the checks and balances by abusing the pandemic to enable (often illegally) widespread mail-in voting. You can literally get a creepy, child sniffing, blatantly corrupt, dementia-patient clown candidate elected with mail-in voting. If that continues, forget De Santis. Forget him too, if the Democrats get their shit together and put Michelle Obama up.
Of course, to a certain type of mind, authoritarian dictatorships are by definition “rightwing”. It’s a sort of homerian epithet, like the rosy-fingered dawn or the wine-dark sea; they can’t help it. It doesn’t mean that what they’re predicting won’t actually be brought about by the Left.
Branding parents who object to Marxist, racist indoctrination of their children as domestic terrorists – how is that movement towards a “Right-wing Dictatorship” going?
If someone describes Trump as a moron what’s left in his vocabulary for President Bonehead?
“Demented grifter” is probably too kind.
A great big pile of [email protected]#£&(* f/=+-% c#£&*()/=
Just a first attempt DM. But then I can’t be arsed to Improve on it…
And the idea the Republican party put Trump up is hilarious; he waded in there and earned the candidature directly from the primary voters. The party machine would have put forward Jeb Bush (who would have lost politely to Hilary Clinton).
This.
Trump did an end run around the party machine. He won the primary – democracy in action – the [Republican] voters chose him. The good establishment candidate would have done another Mitt Romney and politely lost. Wouldn’t want to appear sexist and all.
I really can’t wrap my head around the whole “right wing dictatorship” thing. Do the writers have any idea how much government is *despised* on the right-of-center in the USA?
@Hopper They don’t. They’re the type that sees anything to the “right” of full-blown Socialism as “extreme right-wing”.
They don’t even realise that only the most extreme Woke-addled activists within the Democrats are even remotely close to their own political flavour. The rest of the Dems are right to far-right of that.
Canadian democracy has already collapsed and they’re worried about *us*?
Dr. Jordan Peterson actually put things pretty accurately. Even though he’s a Canadian, he did live in Boston for a little while and his public status allows him to travel here as he wishes.
He said, “What I’m hoping for is a return to normative incompetence among politicians. That would be really nice.”
He also noted that Trump didn’t start any pointless wars (or any at all, for that matter), and I would add that he created more peace in the Middle East than any president has in the past 25 years.
Regardless of how one feels about his handling of the pandemic, it’s fair to say Trump had a pretty structured task force, and VP Pence at least attempted to do his job effectively. The administration was able to bring us three vaccines within one year by speeding up the approval process. And the vaccines (maybe not J&J) at least have enough efficacy for today’s leftists to pass draconian mandates forcing you to get them. Of course, Trump never expressed support for mandates, and he was all for allowing the exploration of alternative treatments like hydroxychloroquine.
Compare that with Biden and Kamala. Kamala has done nothing beyond photo-ops and late night talk show appearances for any of her assignments. Biden still can’t give us a number on American citizens still stranded in Afghanistan, and he’s seemed to have forgotten the country exists at this point. Russia and China have taken note and are about to attempt invasions in Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively, possibly a precursor to our military getting involved in yet another stupid conflict/war. Iran will likely take advantage of our weakness as well, as Biden began restarting talks of a nuclear deal. As for Afghanistan, the last time the Taliban were in charge, Al Qaeda also gained power and attacked the U.S., so there’s a comforting thought.
Oh, plus inflation coupled with massive government spending bills, plus a prolonged economic malaise from federal efforts to mandate vaccines for the private sector, plus a crime wave that even the mayor of San Francisco is now acknowledging, plus an entire executive branch that’s more concerned with woke policies than solving a single problem. And this is all within the first year.
So at least one chamber of Congress is going to flip to the Republicans, hopefully enough so there is a solid majority, and the best we can hope for is one more year of the same liberal bullshit, then two years of a lame-duck presidency. God help us if this lot stays in power for a second term.
As for ideology…For decades, moderate Americans have been saying, “If only we had a fiscally conservative, small-government president who didn’t give a shit about gay people getting married, we’d have someone to vote for.” Everyone the GOP put up was demonized by the left, who called Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2, John McCain and Mitt Romney all the same names they’re calling Trump now. Politeness and defensively saying “some of my best friends are black” didn’t work for most GOP candidates. They were all called Nazis anyway. Or, if they were Ted Cruz, the media could only focus on how “weird” he looked.
Welp, so we voted for Trump. And now that we have media darling Biden, everything’s going to shit. So what have we learned?