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

What seems to have pushed the United States to the brink of losing its democracy today is a multiplication effect between its underlying flaws and recent shifts in the society’s “material” characteristics. These shifts include stagnating middle-class incomes, chronic economic insecurity, and rising inequality as the country’s economy – transformed by technological change and globalization – has transitioned from muscle power, heavy industry, and manufacturing as the main sources of its wealth to idea power, information technology, symbolic production and finance. As returns to labour have stagnated and returns to capital have soared, much of the U.S. population has fallen behind... Economic insecurity is widespread in broad swaths of the country’s interior, while growth is increasingly concentrated in a dozen or so metropolitan centres.

Two other material factors are key. The first is demographic: as immigration, aging, intermarriage and a decline in church-going have reduced the percentage of non-Hispanic white Christians in America, right-wing ideologues have inflamed fears that traditional U.S. culture is being erased and whites are being “replaced.” The second is pervasive elite selfishness: The wealthy and powerful in America are broadly unwilling to pay the taxes, invest in the public services, or create the avenues for vertical mobility that would lessen their country’s economic, educational, racial and geographic gaps. The more an under-resourced government can’t solve everyday problems, the more people give up on it, and the more they turn to their own resources and their narrow identity groups for safety.

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

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

#ThomasHomerDixon #Collapse #Fascism #UnitedStates #Politics #Trumpism #Risk #Institutions #LiberalDemocracy

Fear is Good (2009)

... Ultimately, it isn’t undue pessimism that is dangerous, but undue optimism. Over the past two decades, undue optimism produced irrational exuberance, housing bubbles and unbridled confidence in the benefits of financial innovation. Undue optimism also encouraged commentators to label anyone who expressed doubts about the trajectory of the global economy or about the dangers of financial innovation as a crank, which served only to discourage healthy skepticism.. ...

https://homerdixon.com/fear-is-good/

#fear #risk #bias #optimism #pessimism #ThomasHomerDixon