In early 2019, I worked on a comparative analysis about what happens when a populist leader/party wins state office. It was published in the Journal of Democracy and can also be found here. Perhaps the major finding in that piece was the following:
“Once populists become established in power, what are the paths that a nation might take? The available cases suggest that there are three: 1) Populism might entrench itself and become systemic, inducing weakly liberal parties to shift in a populist direction; 2) populism might turn into outright autocracy; or 3) liberal forces might defeat populism at the polls and return to power” (p74).
The whole logic was condensed simply in the following graph:
Today, less than 100 days before the US general elections in November 2020, the major question is: Which direction is populist Trump’s America headed towards? Can it move safely back to liberalism? Or is it transforming into an autocracy? This post is meant to trace the signs of the direction the US is finally going to take.
30 July: How about delaying the November election lest the USA avoid “embarrassment”?
4 August: In a one-to-one interview with Fox News, Trump responded to journalist’s remark that “a thousand Americans are dying a day” with an answer that rang shockingly similar to any autocrat’s: “It is what it is”!!!
TBC’d . . .
