How America Could Become A Dictatorship

2025-09-14 03:14:53

(MENAFN- Asia Times) As we try to think through the potential consequences of the assassination of Donald Trump's close ally, the 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk, we need to keep three facts in mind.

One is that America is a country in which there are more guns in private hands than there are people. A second is that political violence is commonplace there. And the third is that Trump and some of his most loyal supporters immediately reacted to this terrible assassination by emphasising and exploiting the country's political divide rather than by appealing for unity.

In Europe, when we think about Trump's America we mainly worry about the damage he has done to the transatlantic relationship, to our exporters and to the prospects of ending Russia's invasion of Ukraine. What this tragic episode tells us, however, is that we also need to worry about the stability of America's democracy, a democracy that in the past has served as a beacon for liberty in Europe too, despite America's many flaws.

Neither dictatorship nor civil war is inevitable. America has in the past proved itself to be resilient in the face of violent disorder. Its democracy survived the 1960s when both President John F Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, as well as the civil rights activist Martin Luther King, were assassinated.

And it survived the 1970s when anti-Vietnam war protestors were shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio and when four years later President Richard Nixon had to resign over the Watergate break-in against his political opponents that he had authorised.

The attack on America 24 years ago on September 11, 2001, in which Al Qaeda terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people, united a country that, less than a year earlier, had been deeply divided by a presidential election that had to be resolved by a politically partisan Supreme Court.

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