Economic downturns tend to cause social unrest which legitimize expansion of the security state.

In this case, it appears that a fascist dictatorship is deliberately inducing the downtown to justify expansion of the DHS.

Naomi Klein laid out how this has happened in the past (particularly in the former Soviet states after the break up of the USSR) in her book Shock Doctrine. The pattern has also been laid out as a counter-insurgency strategy in Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method.

But the nut of it is that you tend to get both.