Building Toward Futures for What's Next for America
How I'm attempting to build a larger conceptual frame for forecasting all of this.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…
… and one of those ways to show you how I’m trying to build a larger way to think about possible futures for our nation.
OK, gang, this newsletter is going to be a bit of a mess. But I’m trying to SHOW the mess. Foresight processes can be a bit of a mess along the way even for the most organized minds — of which mine is not. And parts of what follows will be blindingly obvious and long-since-figured-out and shows me going the long way around the barn to the obvious — and I know that. What I’m trying to do is integrate a lot of obvious-but-separate pieces into more of a non-obvious new, integrated picture of options for what could be ahead. I’m not nearly done — and I may still completely bomb this — but for teaching purposes I thought I’d show you how I’m thinking through the attempt.
Last week I talked about doing a grand revisit, rethink, and integration of all of my forecasts and thinking over the life of this newsletter on futures for Trump, for the GOP, and for American democracy. I’m undergoing that thought process now.
My original scenarios for futures of American democracy (that I wrote two years ago) remain sound but now I can expand on them and make them more robust and allow them to include more.
When I wrote my original American democracy scenarios it wasn’t clear whether Trump would (a) run for office again, or if he did would actually adopt (b) Project 2025 and/or (c) Elon Musk and the tech oligarchs. He did all three and made (b) and (c) overlap except when they really, really don’t.
As a result, my framing was whether American democracy continued or not but without a clear picture of what the exact countervailing force would be. That structure yielded presence-or-absence-of-American-democracy in each case rather than democracy-or-some-other-governing-vision scenario set. And those scenarios were predicated on whether a unitary MAGA Party or a unitary Democratic Party captured the Big Middle (ie. the majority of bulk) of American voters. But now it’s clear that a civil war (or wars) are breaking out within both parties so we can no longer assume the continuation of a unitary identity in either party.
It’s clear now, two years later, that the countervailing force is a fascist/fascistic/fascist-y impulse and vision. Back when I wrote the original scenarios it looked like a without-Trump-on-the-ballot-only-a-nihilistic-vacuum-remained would probably be the only political alternative/countervailing force. (Now, as I’ve said before, it’s not quite full fascism and the use of the term fascism isn’t quite fair but I haven’t found a more accurate word yet and nothing rhymes with orange and yeah, I get it, but I’ll show you in a minute how I’ll try to step back from this sort of bias because if you foresee from a biased starting place you get bad scenarios.)
In the original I lacked a variable on the effectiveness of government — something I overly incorporated into (or made overly inherent within) the critical variables (the axes) of the original project. (To cut you off so you don’t get ahead of me: Effectiveness of government for whom is a different axis.)
Thinking through how to introduce an effectiveness of government variable this time around reminded me of a conceptual tool I’ve used for years that’s so dead-simple somebody else must have come up with this already: an Intent-Capability Matrix. (It’s based on thinking from the threat assessment disciplines.) It simply intersects whether an actor wants to do something with whether it can.
Here’s what a blank one looks like:
So for example…
The Democrats since the Clinton era — because they believe the federal government can and should work for the American people — have attempted and sometimes passed large initiatives that would have (and sometimes have) made Americans’ lives appreciably, tangibly better and were responsive to American voters’ will and demands (ie. the Affordable Care Act, the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, etc.) but were hobbled in implementation by Republicans and by Democrats’ and the federal government’s own processes. For nearly 30 years they’ve been the Party of Wants To Do It But Can’t.
The Republicans since the Reagan era — because they believe the federal government almost can only do harm to the American people and thus that less government means Americans’ lives would thus automatically become appreciably, tangibly better via a form of benign neglect — have sabotaged or downsized government when it has held power. For 40 years they’ve been the Party of Can but Doesn’t Want To.
So for the past week I’ve been trying to integrate my original American democracy scenarios with some version of an Intent-Capability Matrix in an attempt to integrate some sort of effectiveness of government variable into the mix. And it broke my brain.
So I lateraled back to think about two other things:
First, the ‘camps’ and the ‘battle lines’ in the ‘civil wars’ within each of the parties are not clear yet — and more camps may show up soon to fight for primacy within the parties of each.
Currently, MAGA isn’t as unified as it looks. The GOP is split between the TechBro Oligarchs (with J.D. Vance) on one side and Trump and the MAGA faithful on the other — with Christian nationalists and Project 2025 overlapping the two but moreso in the Trump camp. Both camps are authoritarian of one stripe or another but without Trump binding them together and freeing them up to act, they’ll devolve into conflict with each other.
The Democrats very recently — as part of their own grief-driven introspection over Trump’s reelection — have started to internally debate aspects of their own approach, identity, and core values. Right now that’s shaping up into a debate between old school progressives (if that’s a term) and proponents of what’s called the abundance agenda. (I’ll describe this better later but an unfair oversimplification of the abundance camp’s central premise is that the federal government’s internal processes — which were designed to thwart bigotry and fraud and the ability of big companies to prey upon Americans — created so much red tape that the government can’t do good things even when it wants to. It's opponents fear that without those structures in place in the manner they’re currently in place then bigotry, fraud, and danger will return like back in The Bad Old Days. Both sides may be right and I haven’t read my copy of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson yet so I can’t represent any of this fairly yet. So please recognize that this is just my insufficient first-flinch description.)
Second, it occurred to me that I may have already written the list of variables I need for the next iteration of scenarios for the future of the United States in the “victory conditions for American democracy” section of my original project. Here’s what I originally wrote in that section:
For American democracy to survive or remain viable most or all of the following claims must be true – or held to be true – by most people domestically and abroad. These are the success or victory conditions for American democracy for these scenarios.
If more than a few of these have been fundamentally brought into question by the end of a scenario, American democracy will functionally cease to exist, become a partial democracy, or become a democracy in name only.
Voice
All United States citizens can vote.
All votes will be counted.
Who wins the majority of votes wins an election.
Political change can be made nonviolently; the peaceful transfer of power is guaranteed.
Opportunity and Fairness
Anyone from anywhere can become a United States citizen.
Anyone from anywhere can make their fortune in the United States. Anyone from anywhere can rise beyond the station, class, caste, and constraints of their origins.
Anyone from anywhere will be treated fairly and equitably by the American government, system, and people.
Nature of Government
American governance is of, by, and for the people rather than its elites and powerful.
The legislative process in the United States hears and is responsive to the will of its people. The legislative process functions and can work. Change can be made through legislation.
Freedoms and Rights
Americans’ freedoms and rights will be protected – from majority rule, minority rule, the powerful, and even from the United States Government.
The only exception to this is that one’s free exercise of one’s freedoms and rights must not unduly impinge on or jeopardize other Americans’ free exercise of theirs.
The things to notice:
Half of the country believes most of these are true and half believes almost none of them are. (I may return to this another day because as I went through the list I made a chart in my head of how a broad, fictional sort of Democrat or MAGA person might react to each of those premises today. May be some foresight-relevant juice there for us later.)
That a particular few of these have been called into question means that those particular few probably are our critical variables for forecasting the possible futures ahead for the United States.
Let’s pull all this together — victory conditions for American democracy, civil war battle lines within the parties, the Intent-Capability Matrix, and the rest of it. Yes, this will only be half an answer and no, it won’t be enough. It’s only how far I’ve gotten in a week.
The deepest questions (variables) ahead of us now and soon — if you take the bark and the bias off of them — are something like:
whether America will be ruled of, by, and for the people or whether it will be ruled of, by, and for the few — or the one;
whether the American constitutional order — with its checks and balances and the rule of law — remains intact and strong regardless of who rules it;
and whether — and how — American democracy can deliver a better life for its citizens than authoritarian or other forms could. (No, I don’t quite have this variable nailed down right yet.)
Sounds kinda simple-minded, right? Distilling a lot of stuff down to its simplest forms should look pretty DUH by the time you lay it out on the table.
But here’s where it gets complicated and then simple again:
Each of those three variables are largely independent variables: the answers to any of the three don’t necessarily dictate the answers to any of the others. They are sufficiently separate variables. This is a Good Thing for foresight purposes.
We have all been existential-dread-terrified that there’s only two possible futures ahead — that there’s only Doom or Rescue ahead. But the lines of debate — the three variables — mean there’s more than two futures ahead. See:
One variable gives you two possible futures — a coin only lands on heads or tails.
Two variables gives you a 2x2 matrix — a quadrant model of four possible futures like you’ve seen me build before.
A third variable bisects each of the quadrants. And if this three-variable foresight structure works — and there’s only a small-maybe-of-a-chance that it will — then it should allow us to place almost all of the arguments and movements and all of the heroes and the bastards and all of the Ezra Kleins and Timothy Snyders and the Curtis Yarvins and Steven Levitskys and almost all of the current and emerging chess pieces on the same board.
Side Note: Veteran professional futurists will recognize what I’m doing here is methodologically risky at best and in the nearly two decades I taught this I never allowed any of my students to ever, ever do this: I’m creating an octagon/octet/eight-scenario set. (It’s done so rarely by professionals it doesn’t actually have a name. And I’m not giving it one now.) Attempting an octet-thing scenario set is usually procedurally dumb because it’s overly, needlessly complex… but hey, we’re in deep danger enough already so let’s just give it a whirl and see what we get.
I’m saying there’s not only Certain Doom or Survival ahead. There’s not just two futures ahead.
There’s eight.
And while you’re busy saying What the fuck is that? and going through the diagram I’ll say That’s not even half of a fuck and I have no idea whether this conceptual direction can work or this approach can pan out and No, I have no idea yet what comes next in this process.
But it’s a good start. And I’ll continue building it and/or embarrassing myself in front of you. Rapidly. Because I’ve got an idea.
See you next week.
Eight sides! Brilliant- and ancient. The Chinese Baqua, and it’s use with the I Ching in divination. I’m INTRIGUED with what You come up with 👍🏼😎❤️🎵
Exactly. The blue states that want these things will build them. But they'll find significant obstacles in both federal law, and the demands of federal taxation. At some point, they're going to want reclaim both the freedom and the cash to do things their way. And that's when they'll come into conflict with red states who are determined to keep them hogtied and paying the bills. How that resolves is anyone's guess.
California's been fighting these battles since the 70s, mostly over environmental standards. They're the place this future emerged first. But the fast-heating front right now is the tussle between blue and red states over abortion laws: what's perfectly legal in some states is tantamount to a death-penalty offense in others, and the latter keep trying to extend enforcement jurisdiction into the former. The last time anyone (actually, mostly the same states, in fact) tried to do that, it was the Fugitive Slave Act, which was the final match that ignited the Civil War. So that's how that goes.
"Fuck it, we'll do it ourselves" feels like the most likely scenario to me, given the pressures at work. But I wouldn't put down money on the odds that the nation will survive that path intact -- especially since the red states now seem just as determined to force their will on the blue ones as they were in 1860. (They've made it clear that they're quite happy to see us dead, and they've got the guns and a well-developed narrative that would justify doing it.)
They're not going to let us go our own way without a fight, possibly one to the literal death. We should take that seriously. After all, they've done it before.