People have been crying wolf about the destruction of the US for a long time. But recently, when the President wanted to use the military on protestors, and was told no, it seemed like more than just the obvious, more than a recapitulation of the past. If they said yes, and then a state of emergency was declared, it sounds like a stereotypical way to go right to an excuse for suspending elections. I didn't really expect that people would let him do it, but it really seems like he would if he could. It's so pat.
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.