A noted political scientist warned that the US could be under the rule of a right-wing dictator by 2030

• A political scientist has warned that the US may come under the rule of a right-wing dictator by 2030.
• Researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon warned that American democracy may collapse if Trump wins in 2024.
• He attributed the cause of possible “widespread civil violence” to the “near-fascist personality cult” of Trumpism.

A Canadian political scientist has warned that the US could find itself under the rule of a right-wing dictator as soon as 2030. 

Thomas Homer-Dixon, the founding director of the Cascade Institute research center at the Royal Roads University in British Columbia and the University Research Chair in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, penned an op-ed in The Globe and Mail titled: “The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare.”

Homer-Dixon, who describes himself as a “scholar of violent conflict,” warned that the US is becoming “increasingly ungovernable,” predicting that if it were to continue down its current path, the country could “descend into civil war.” 

In the piece, he highlighted “warning signals” that point to the idea that by 2025, American democracy could unravel, resulting in “extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence.” 

Homer-Dixon predicted that if Trump were to return to the White House, the former president “will have only two objectives, vindication, and vengeance.” He warned that Canada has focused on other issues like COVID-19 and climate change, and is “unprepared” for a “terrible storm” coming from the US in the event of Trump’s reelection.

“By weaponizing people’s fear and anger, Mr. Trump and a host of acolytes and wannabees such as Fox’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, have captured the storied GOP and transformed it into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy,” he wrote. 

He added that Trumpism is beginning to closely resemble European fascism in its “contempt for the rule of law and glorification of violence,” though Trump may “just be a warm-up act” for what is to come. 

If Trump runs for office in 2024 and is reelected, “he’ll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy, but the process will produce a political and social shambles,” Homer-Dixon wrote. “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.”

Homer-Dixon’s op-ed echoes a report from the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), a Stockholm-based think-tank. IDEA’s “Global State of Democracy Report 2021” named the US a “backsliding democracy.”

“Significantly, the United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself, and was knocked down a significant number of steps on the democratic scale,” wrote the think-tank in its annual report.