The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare

Thu, 6 Jan 2022 05:42:54 +1100

Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>

Andrew Pam
<https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-american-polity-is-cracked-and-might-collapse-canada-must-prepare/>

"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.

This past November, more than 150 professors of politics, government, political
economy and international relations appealed to Congress to pass the Freedom to
Vote Act, which would protect the integrity of US elections but is now stalled
in the Senate. This is a moment of “great peril and risk,” they wrote. “Time is
ticking away, and midnight is approaching.”

I’m a scholar of violent conflict. For more than 40 years, I’ve studied and
published on the causes of war, social breakdown, revolution, ethnic violence
and genocide, and for nearly two decades I led a centre on peace and conflict
studies at the University of Toronto.

Today, as I watch the unfolding crisis in the United States, I see a political
and social landscape flashing with warning signals."

Via Doc Edward Morbius, who wrote:

Thomas Homer-Dixon, whom I strongly recommend reading, at the Globe and
Mail.

Dixon’s website with more publications: https://homerdixon.com/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778363

Cheers,
       *** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net               Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/                 Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/            Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/               Manager, Serious Cybernetics

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