importance for the entire democratic experiment in human history. a very good if worrying point. thomas, if democracy does die in america, it could be in a drip-drip legalistic fashion in the way that hungary went full authoritarian under viktor orban, or it could be marked by widespread violence in the streets. you mentioned in your piece how civil war is now being discussed by the experts. how worried are you about which direction we go in as a country? in many ways, once we start to think about these things we enter into a sort of land of imponderables. you know, it s just extraordinary. i have to say i find this an unbelievably difficult piece to write. i m a writer by profession, and i ve published many, many pieces in newspapers around the world, but this one was extraordinary in its difficulty. in part because the consequences seem so unmentionable.
country, as i m sure you re aware of, that you write about, whose audience does believe the lie and they spend no time taking apart or showing their viewers the evidence that it is not rooted in fact. so, you ve diagnosed the problem. i hope we can continue to call on you to help figure out some solutions. thomas homer-dixon, thank you so much for spending some time with us and thank you for the piece that you wrote. it certainly did strike a nerve and start a conversation. we ve talked about it every day since it came out. thank you. thank you very much. when we come back, even though doctors say schools are the safest places for kids, some parents and some teachers and some students have real concerns about this latest covid surge. we ll talk through all the facts with our medical experts in the case. stay with us. with our medical experts in the case stay with us
real and the horrible common place. joining us now is the author of that dire warning, thomas homer-dixon, canadian political scientist and executive director of the cascade institute at royal rhodes university. we ve been wanting to have this conversation for days. thank you so much for spending time with us. and we are so self-absorbed. we don t that s not really a partisan observation. it s just the fact of our nature. but tell me how canadians view america right now. we view america with enormous concern and worry as does much of the world, really. but also, i think, with anguish because we are friends of america. many of us have spent much of our lives in america. i spent many years in graduate school in the united states, and our associations, of course, are
i m exhausted. in a rather remarkable intervention one preeminent canadian political scientist now says it is time for our neighbors to the north to start making plans for the end of the american democratic experiment. quote, 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. author thomas homer dixon says 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. today as i watch the unfolding crisis in the united states i see a political and social landscape flashing with warning signals. so i ask you, exactly how many sirens and red lights flashing is it going to take to wake this country up? who better to ask than thomas homer dixon himself, the author
there are three-quarters of a million canadian emigres in the united states, many of them very influential. we might have a voice at sometime though we have to be careful of being accused of interfering in american affairs. but i think for the most part it s about saying where we stand and how important what happens over the next year in the united states is to the entire world. yes, indeed. we ll have to leave it there. thomas homer-dixon, thank you very much for your time tonight. i appreciate it. thank you. still to come, in 2022 on this holiday weekend is martin luther king s democratic dream still alive? we ll take a look at what s happening to voting rights in arizona, kyrsten sinema s state. plus, what could happen if a president decides to keep a campaign promise? i ll explain in the 60-second rant. don t go away. don t go away. voltaren is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory gel