United States: Dictatorship or Civil War (Brussels Morning)
Channel: Sam Vaknin's Musings
Date: 2024-03-23

Read the column: https://brusselsmorning.com/united-states-dictatorship-or-civil-war/37721/

If Trump wins the November elections, the United Stated is headed for a dictatorship. If Biden gains the upper hand, Trump and his conspiracist base will never concede and this will inexorably lead to a civil war. 

The truth is that the United States is a contiguous continental empire driven to expansion by immigration and military conquests and underpinned by slavery and avarice. It is one of the few remaining colonial enterprises. 

Like all empires before it, the USA is heterogenous and suffers from multifarious social ills. These tensions and torsions periodically erupt and rend it asunder. The 1960s-1970s witnessed a slow motion civil war as destructive in its own way as the one in the 1860s-1870s. 

But whereas all previous internecine conflicts revolved around relatively narrow issues, the coming conflagration is about the very nature of the polity. Even the Confederacy did not challenge the democratic nature of the USA. Trump does. 

Moreover: for the first time in its history, the United States is not cohered by any unifying vision - or external enemy. 

Russia has many supporters in the revamped populist Republican party.
China is emerging as a threat, but it is also the second or first largest trade partner of the USA and one of its most prominent foreign investors. Not exactly the successor to imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, or the USSR.

Internally, there is an unbridgeable abyss between Conservatives and Liberal-Progressives which renders this vast country ungovernable. Virulent, visceral partisanship is only the symptom of this accelerating and escalating disintegration. 

The USA will survive the way the Roman empire did before it. But it would become unrecognizable even to itself. Transmogrified and disoriented, its rump will stumble along, buffeted by challengers and challenges until it is no more.