This sounds both accurate and very depressing. The frightening aspect for me personally is that even if the current President loses the election and leaves office peacefully, he has transformed his party, perhaps permanently. Its not just him, its been happening for a while. But the country cannot be governed by a single party; it needs both parties to function. If one of them refuses to accept reality and scientific facts, I doubt that the country can continue to function, even if the people holding majority are qualified and sensible.
This was incredibly clear during the Obama Administration. Not sure what kind of inane cultural wars will consume the next one.
As much as people have cried wolf over the last decade plus (maybe more, I don't recall) about whether there would be normal elections, I feel like now we have a discrete point in time where the (un)willingness of the volunteer military to do unconstitutional things is all that remains; the people and other institutions are no longer in control of our fate.
You can say, oh, we're fine, the military still has integrity. But it's a volunteer military that's become a distinct class; if they're the only bulwark, then we're very close to a military dictatorship. At best, it could be like in certain countries where they serve as a check on bad civilian governance.
So, I can still hope/think that this President as dictator is alarmism, but I can't say that if it is crying wolf, it is making me more confident the US will go on and on. He can end his term as an ineffectual wanna-be despot, but he's probing and outlining the weak points - how someone smarter and more respected and sympathetic can deal the final blow to the system. Someone said that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
What recent events make me think of is the point Richard Feynman made about the O-rings in the Challenger investigation:
"To paraphrase Feynman's example, if engineers built a bridge that could bear 3,000 pounds without any damage, even though it was never expected to bear more than 1,000 pounds in practice, the safety factor would be 3. If a 1,000-pound truck drove across the bridge and a crack appeared in a beam, even just a third of the way through a beam, the safety factor is now zero: The bridge is defective, there was no safety factor at all even though the bridge did not actually collapse."
So yes, people were saying the same things in the 1970s. And they were wrong. But things always seem worse for good reason, and eventually, some day, things do fundamentally change. When things crack, but don't break completely, it is not necessarily a sign everything is fine.
Covid doesn't seem in itself like an existential threat to the US in particular, but any time it seems like people are denying reality that worries me, honestly scares me, and certainly it's been over a month that global daily cases are reaching new heights, while financial markets and the media seem detached and focused on reopening. Maybe we need to stay the course; maybe Mnuchin and many others are right that there's no going back, but the sense that people are imposing their wishes on reality, as though it is reality which will be forced to bend, feels like a bad premonition to me. I hate the idea of daring fate, of putting the all-powerful to the test.