Ian Bremmer!

Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm, was on Charlie Rose’s show this week, expressing his views about where we are at this moment in time.  I’ve watched Bremmer many times, and while I don’t always agree with him, I find his insights trenchant and worth listening to.

What particularly caught my attention this time was his response to a question about whether he was concerned about Trump’s upcoming presidency and if he was what concerned him.  “Three things,” he said: Incompetence, corruption and authoritarianism.

As to incompetence, he wasn’t overly concerned.  The institutional structures that are in place will be a bulwark to prevent a major disaster.

Corruption, he said, was possible, especially given the likelihood that interlocking business and administrative decisions would create opportunities for bad behavior.  But here, too, he wasn’t overly concerned.

An authoritarian president, however, is a threat to everything this country stands for.  A president willing to use his powers to get his way, the public interest be damned, is a danger to our way of life and what we hold dear.

My takeaway:  We are not immune to a dictatorship.  We are not immune to fascism.  We are not immune to having our civil rights diminished.  Democracy as we have known it up to now is not a guarantee.

Beware, my friends!