I can’t speak for Vance but my expectation would be even “softer” than that—more like a defanged democracy in which e.g. a combination of gerrymandering and obstacles put up to citizenship or voting means that only favored groups get to vote properly. This shifts the Overton window solidly on the right and then you get at best cosmetic competitions between who gets to be the fascist leader of the year. So perhaps more a sort of oligarchy than a dictatorship?
That said, I am also not necessarily sure that this is the only possible future or even the most likely one from here. This might be copium on my part, but I think it might as well be just a cycle which then eventually turns around when the right wing populists inevitably fail to deliver. In Britain, for example, the flirtation with UKIP and even the far less extreme Boris Johnson seems to have been rather contained, and despite leaving long lasting effects on the country, it also has on balance seemingly brought ruin to the British right, with the Tories polling disastrously and projected to be destroyed in the next GE. History isn’t as simple as extrapolating a few trends indefinitely and calling it a day.
I can’t speak for Vance but my expectation would be even “softer” than that—more like a defanged democracy in which e.g. a combination of gerrymandering and obstacles put up to citizenship or voting means that only favored groups get to vote properly. This shifts the Overton window solidly on the right and then you get at best cosmetic competitions between who gets to be the fascist leader of the year. So perhaps more a sort of oligarchy than a dictatorship?
That said, I am also not necessarily sure that this is the only possible future or even the most likely one from here. This might be copium on my part, but I think it might as well be just a cycle which then eventually turns around when the right wing populists inevitably fail to deliver. In Britain, for example, the flirtation with UKIP and even the far less extreme Boris Johnson seems to have been rather contained, and despite leaving long lasting effects on the country, it also has on balance seemingly brought ruin to the British right, with the Tories polling disastrously and projected to be destroyed in the next GE. History isn’t as simple as extrapolating a few trends indefinitely and calling it a day.