[From “Is a Protestant Franco Inevitable?”]

Our Constitution is stretched to the breaking point. Contested elections, failures to pass a federal budget, impeachments, talk of packing the Supreme Court, emerging fights between states about extradition, politicized persecution of dissidents, and many other such strains all reveal the U.S. to be a schizophrenic state, divided by incompatible visions of justice and the good life. Our circumstances augur the return of history: The constitutional and cultural tensions echo our Civil War and a number of others

The right knows all of this and yet remains complacent[…]
Such complacency is the opposite of filial piety. America’s founders understood the rare and fragile nature of the regime they established[…]
Consider John Adams, who in his later years said Polybius’s theory of regime cycles “has been the Creed of my whole Life”[…]
I mused on Twitter[…]“Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco”[…]Anarchic trajectory will soon require a person like Franco to reestablish order[…]This muscular leader would most naturally be Protestant. I didn’t expect the prediction to be controversial[…]
Hayes Brown cited my statement as proof that “Conservatives keep calling for an American dictator.” Conservative commentators critiqued Protestant Franco as well[…]
Possible that conditions will deteriorate until something like a Protestant Franco becomes inevitable. If that happens, the utopian grading rubric for our politics will vanish. When civil strife starts, you give up the more noble aims of politics and rush to the person who is least likely to kill your friends and family[…]
Possibility of Protestant Franco should change our political behavior. Politics[…]has a threat of violence[…]Given the facts of mass immigration and the collapse of the family and civic society, to what extent does it even make sense to discuss America’s old civic tradition as if it said something authoritative about our future?