We're headed to a soft dictatorship with some hard edges, and it will be global. No timetables -- either sooner than we think or later than we think.
>>>We’re headed to a soft dictatorship with some hard edges, and it will be global. No timetables — either sooner than we think or later than we think.<<<
Sometimes I’ve thought the same thing - we could go the route of Rome, with the collapse of our Republic being replaced by an Empire - and the Roman Empire was just as you’ve described, as was Mussolini’s attempt to recreate the Empire, fasces and all, in the last century.
In which case, the United States lasts for a thousand years, sometimes lurching between bad despots, and our Constitution will remain in the history books for some future generation to read and think about, in the same way we read Cicero and Aristotle today and think about Periclean democracy. Maybe they’ll need a New World to recreate our experiment - and, fortunately, it looks like the universe is filled with those new worlds.
Then there’s part of me that thinks we’ll succeed in my generation and reestablish the republic.
I guess we’ll see.