That scenario assumes that history will work the same way it did in the aftermath of WWII. There is no guarantee of that. America could become another Russia, where the collapse of the Soviet Union led to secession of several republics. The new democratic government was too weak to face the challenges of successive financial crises and active civil wars. Eventually power falls back into the hands of s strongman who scales back democratic reforms to maintain power.

Hand Maid's Tale doesn't seem so fictional after all of this in how the divisions would reshape the country

Once you “swing” to authoritarianism the authoritarian doesn’t let you swing back.

Yet the people always prevail, but sometimes it does take longer time than others, yea.

No, they don't.

There are decades and centuries where authoritarians and dictators prevail. There is no timeline for guaranteeing democracy and human rights will prevail.

It takes action, diligence, and sacrifice to preserve those things. And even more to regain them once lost.

Ok, name one authoritarian state that never fell, besides the authoritarian states we have today?

Of course it eventually falls down, everything does. I'm not saying it won't be difficult, nor many people will ultimately die, and the country will be very different. But it will happen, if not sooner, then later, like in every other place in the world.

> Ok, name one authoritarian state that never fell, besides the authoritarian states we have today?

By defintion, if it “never fell”, it would be one of the authoritarian states we have today, so the obvious lack of any example fulfilling that criteria doesn't demonstrate anything one way or the other.

Now, if you could say something like “point to any authoritarian regime existing after <year> that had existed for longer than <span in years>”, that might tend to support the claim that, at least after a certain point in time, authoritarian regimes tended to have a particular finite lifespan (of course, you can never prove that currently-existing regimes aren’t exceptions to that withot access to future knowledge.)

At one point I had a hypothesis based on a few notable examples that with certain definitional bounds this might work with some point in the 20th century and about 80 years (even had a bit of process explanation, though not a strong theory on why it didn't apply earlier beyond the general spread of democratic ideals) but I never rigourously checked if there might be exceptions.

(Of course, plenty of authoritarian regimes fall only to be replaced by different authoritarian regimes, too.)

Authoritarian states and walkable cities are orthogonal problems. You can have car centric city planning in democratic states (see for example the USA).

what makes you so sure it'll fall? plenty of autocracies last for decades, or generations

Incompetence, our "leaders" are woefully incompetent. MAGA, GOP and the right are filled with idiots. The Liberal and Neoliberal Democrats at least were a little better at stealing everything from us and delaying progress. They would bury people in culture wars and keep their followers busy with DEI rules. They used legitimate racist issues and then said everything was caused by racism and not that the 1% was just stealing everything.

> what makes you so sure it'll fall? plenty of autocracies last for decades, or generations

Because you didn't end your sentence with "Plenty of autocracies last forever" but instead you gave them a duration. Maybe that duration sounds long, but it ends eventually, which is exactly my point.

I bet the blow back will be sooner than that. I don't expect Trump to serve out his term; he looks and sounds terrible. And Vance doesn't have the mojo that Trump does. Once Trump is gone the Republicans will start eating their own.

Meh, I feel we’re entering an era where only the elite will be able to realistically check authoritarians, and they will just be lesser

Think more of the earlier end of medieval era, where the peasant class was mostly incapable against feudal armies, even in many cases with massive numbers on their side.

There’s an entire surveillance state, eyes everywhere, gait recognition, massive intelligence networks all at a scale unimaginable by kings and dictators of the past.

The elites are not checking the authoritarians, they're fueling them.

They are them.

For now, those alliances are always tentative through.