Puzzling Further through Futures for America -- and Some Thoughts on Political Murder
I'm going to need your help on this one.
Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…
… and one of those ways to continue some half-baked, incomplete, in-progress, messy foresight work in front of you to make you feel better. Or worse.
OK, this is going to be a front-half, back-half newsletter this week. The first half will be an update on how I’m trying to think through a new framework for the possible futures ahead for the United States — and I’ll ask you to help me via the comment section below. The back half will be a mini-rant/rage-spit about the assassinations in Minnesota last weekend. You can pick up where I leave off in the comments section with your own continuations-of-rant.
OK, front half. I’m picking up where I left off two weeks ago: I’m trying to build my 8-scenario matrix for Futures of the United States of America.
For those of you who are new to Think Future, my very first newsletter two years ago was a scenario set for Futures of American Democracy. In that scenario set I mostly presumed democracy would continue in some form — even if it excluded some people — but I didn’t account enough for the degrees of risk to which American democracy itself might be replaced by a different form of governance altogether. (I had it on my bingo card, but not sufficiently enough.) Now I’m revisiting the whole project — broadening it.
Rather than merely forecasting whether or to the degree that American democracy remains healthy and functional in the next couple of decades, I’m now trying to forecast whether American democracy will continue to exist or not and what might rise up in its place if it’s destroyed or maimed.
Two weeks ago I mentioned that I thought the discourse from all of us who are looking at this keep artificially reducing the number of possible futures to two: Whether we’ll have democracy or a criminal totalitarianism… whether we’ll have democracy or a competitive authoritarianism… whether we’ll have a civil war or not and who will win… whether we’ll have egalitarianism or the world of A Handmaid’s Tale.
None of those are enough, I think, and none of them reconcile any of those futures with each other.
I’ve been trying to build something more comprehensive — a structure that explains all of that plus more. I’ll probably fail but here’s where I am now.
My futurist hunch is that there are about three questions — three independent variables — that matter most right now, and the mix of answers to those three will give us what form of government we’ll have going forward.
Question/Variable #1 (or A): Will we have rule of, by, and for the people (meaning the majority wins but all still participate and vote in governance) or rule of, by, and for the few (an elite and/or the ‘correct’) — or the one? The long political fight since the early 1960s has been between those who want more people included (in the political process and the economy, and more people with the franchise) and those who want fewer people involved (ie. the ‘wrong’ people excluded, intimidated, or gerrymandered out of the process and/or for only wealthy elites and/or the morally ‘correct’ to make societal and political decisions).
Question/Variable #2 (or B): Will the United States’ constitutional order — with its separation of powers, checks and balances, rule of law, guarantee and protection of the rights of all — remain strong or be weakened or torn down?
Question/Variable #3 (or C): Will Americans be happy or sad or angry about the quadrant they wind up as a result of the answers to the first two variables?
Over the past two weeks I’d been trying to make this variable something about whether or not American democracy works for ordinary Americans or whether the federal government is capable of doing it — or whether Congress or the Executive Branch are capable or willing to make legislative or other changes necessary to improve Americans’ lives or whether the economy is better for ordinary Americans or whether grocery prices go up or down. I could never make any of those variables gel because one of the main hangups we’ve suffered as a country these past few decades is that our political polarization and media machines are such that Americans’ contentedness or discontent with the American system are almost completely separated from the American system’s actual performance out there in, you know, objective reality.
Further, sometimes people like living in authoritarian regimes because they think it works better than a democracy (ie. China’s argument about the United States) and because the regime punishes the people they don’t like (ie. every bigoted regime everywhere).
Anyway, it may be too much of a cheat but I’m collapsing all of these factors into this one variable. And this variable may not be dialed in exactly right yet.
Again, like I said two weeks ago, three variables yield eight futures. Like this blank matrix.
Let’s start building this out. (By the way, the numbering in this matrix is irrelevant. They’re just location placeholders rather than a rank ordering or anything.)
First, let’s place the variables on the matrix.
Go ahead and stare at that for a minute. See how the variables work? They’re set up as semi-artificial ends of continuums. (The artificiality is deliberate in this approach to make the different possible futures distinct enough to be discussable and to be planned for.)
OK, let’s see what we get when we start to populate it.
Now it’s beginning to look like something. We at least have the quadrants though we don’t have actual names for all eight scenarios yet. Or descriptions for what happens after we wake up in any of those eight futures. This is just the skeleton.
Let’s see what we have and see if it sorta works — or if it doesn’t.
Top Right Quadrant: Scenario #4 is basically where the United States has been since 1965 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. Ever since then — and ever since Watergate — Americans have been trying to give more people the franchise and equal rights with white men. (Happy Juneteenth everybody, by the way.)
That doesn’t mean everyone has been happy about all that inclusiveness and protection of minority rights.
Full Democracy does not automatically and inherently provide opportunity, prosperity, and/or an equitable economy.
Full Democracy doesn’t automatically defeat political polarization or bureaucratic paralysis sufficiently to protect ordinary citizens from predatory capitalism.
Thus over the past 20 years we’ve wound up more sad/angry and thus in the #3 scenario and thus every election recently has been a change election. (If this quadrant is valid then every President we’ve had since Ford except Trump has functioned from here.)
Bottom Right Quadrant: This is a future in which the United States is a very fragile democracy with probably an overpowered President and few constraints on him (or her) because many aspects of the constitutional order have been so degraded and the Executive Branch faces so few checks nor balances that the President is still freely elected every four years and whomever is elected can take revenge on all his opponents, can suppress the rights of whomever he wants, and he cannot be stopped. And the next freely elected President’s power would be limited only by his or her moral will. The rule of law still exists but the President is above it. The President is king.
Steven Levitsky’s and Lucan Way’s notion of competitive authoritarianism and notions of illiberal democracy like that of Hungary or Turkey — that’s this quadrant. Elected kings. Sorta.
Many Americans may be happy with this arrangement when their guy is in power and when he’s punishing the people they don’t like. And they won’t like it when they lose an election and all their rights and business licenses wind up behind the 8-ball and when they or their loved ones wind up in jail for trumped-up charges. Remember that in the bottom two quadrants Americans’ rights are not guaranteed; they’re afforded at the whim and will of the rulers.
(This is the quadrant Trump wants to function from — and the quadrant he’s been driving for most. Also, the long term Republican pursuit to fulfill the unitary executive theory — that the President’s powers supersede those of the other two branches and that the President may not be checked — is an effort to push the United States into the bottom two quadrants.)
OK, that covers the two right hand quadrants. The two left hand quadrants are ones in which the majority of Americans have given up on American democracy, voting rights, and majority rule long enough for powerful authoritarian groups to seize and keep power.
Bottom Left Quadrant: This is a future in which oligarchs and/or Christian nationalists reign supreme. It’s totalitarian but it’s capricious. It’s a world in which, to quote George Orwell’s Animal Farm, all animals are equal but some are more equal than others. Americans’ rights are not universally guaranteed; they’re conditional upon the whims of the ruling oligarchs and the morally ‘correct’. It’s a world in which the oligarchs are empowered enough and freed enough from the poor and ‘undeserving’ and ‘wrong’ to make the world what they think it ought to be. (This is the world Silicon Valley tech bros, Curtis Yarvin, Christian nationalists, and Project 2025 argue for. This is the world in which A Handmaid’s Tale is possible.)
Top Left Quadrant: This is the Nazi sort of quadrant. This is the totalitarian world in which the laws are absolute and are enforced absolutely. Nazis punish rather than permit even other Nazis from breaking the rules or stepping out of sexual, societal, political, or lunch lines. But the trains run on time. Fortunately, no one on the political scene today is actually advocating for this sort of future.
OK, let’s take a step back and see if this works overall.
Yeah… I think maybe this skeleton works and may be true and valid for discerning futures for the United States. If nothing else, it seems to capture the range of futures that everyone on the political scene now are each trying to create. I still have some doubts about it, though, that I can’t put my finger on.
What do you think? What am I missing? How should I refine these? Please let me know in the comments. Nobody is as smart as everybody.
Now, I haven’t given enough thought to what happy or sad/angry looks like in three of the four quadrants yet. But my instinct is still that happy vs. sad/angry is the true third variable.
By the way, don’t get discouraged that non-democracy is three of the four quadrant-futures ahead: our entire democratic system for 250 years has been set up to protect and continue democracy and we’ve raised generations of living Americans to be Americans rather than fascists. Democracy is not without its defenses.
I’ll continue building this into a full scenario project with all the guts and lead-in material and the explanations and the caveats and all the second and third order ramifications of each of the eight scenarios and I’ll build this more in front of you as we go along. This isn’t nearly complete; again, it’s just a skeleton. It’s just a starting place.
OK, let’s switch the subject to political murder.
So by now it’s undeniable that (alleged) assassin and attempted assassin of Minnesota state legislators Mr. (or Dr.) Vance Boelter was reeeeeeeeeally frickin’ politically motivated to politically shoot some Democrats with actual guns and probably conclude his string of assassinations that day with a mass shooting of protesters at the nearby No Kings protest. (Here’s the text of the federal complaint. Don’t read it — or look at the photos — just before bed.)
Anyway, I made the mistake of watching two (usually smart) political YouTubers debate the moral and lethal equivalence of political violence from the Left and the Right. And it won’t link to it because it was the dumbest debate I have heard in a long time. So bad it offended me. By the end of it I wanted to get into my car and drive straight to the Internet to throttle both of those idiots until they saw sense, stars, and/or Jesus.
The right wing person kept trying to argue that people on the Left — because they daydream about Trump dying from an assassin’s bullet/cheeseburger — were morally inferior to the “peaceful” people on the Right. This right wing person also kept trying to argue that both of Trump’s aspiring assassins last year were liberals (which they were not) and that the 25-ish killings during the “COVID riots” of 2020 were liberals killing conservatives when it was almost entirely the opposite. And she dismissed the Capitol Riot as nonserious and nonviolent. And the left wing person was so befuzzled he missed a lot of the conflation and worse.
In light of my nonviolent-rhetorical-throat-throttling-level-of-frustration, I’ll say a few quick things:
Do not punch Nazis no matter how much those Nazis may deserve a good punching. And Lord knows some of them rich white boys have extremely punchable faces. And do not shoot people because shooting people is bad.
Neither the Left nor the Right have a monopoly on violence nor on the argumentation for violence. Neither are inherently peaceful nor inherently warlike. But right now in this historical moment only one side actually commits violence in any serious amounts and only one side arms for it and talks about wanting to do it to any serious degree. (If you want to find out how, why, and when either side — or both — can and will go out and kill people, I wrote two books on the subject. They’re here and here. They’re really light reading. You’re gonna love ‘em.)
The main reason why liberals don’t kill a lot of (or hardly any) conservatives is because liberals aren’t trying to kill people. Not now and not back during the 1960s and 1970s. Back then (very wrong) liberals were setting off bombs by the hundreds and more per year to (dumbly) try to dissuade the Nixon and other Administrations from continuing the (also dumb) Vietnam War. In all of those bombings over 5 or 10 years, you know how many people those liberals killed in that whole campaign? Either 8 or 12 people total, depending on how you count it and even still two of that number were some Weather Underground people who accidentally blew themselves up while building a bomb in a dumbly manner. A good, solid conservative mass killer would refer to 8 to 12 people dead in a single attack as a good start or rookie numbers.
There are several running tallies of political murders committed inside the United States since 9/11. The one I use is from the New America Foundation. I find theirs to be more comprehensive than most. It currently counts 137 murders by members of the far Right, 121 by Salafi-jihadists, 17 by incels (which are part of the Right), 13 by Black separatists/nationalists, and only one by a member of the far Left. Now, we could include nonlethal assaults and mere attempted murders which would bring the Hodgkinson attack on Steve Scalise into the count. We could include the 2023 mass shooting at The Covenant school in Nashville (which may have been more of a matter of a broken conservative going back home to his conservative school to kill it and everyone in it than a liberal killing conservatives but that’s a debate for another time). And we could include a few others but still when you tally up the numbers the actual violence and murder problem is far, far more a feature of the Right than of the Left in this historical moment. For the Left to become as violent or as aspiringly-violent as the Right would require the Left unlearning every lesson about heroic nonviolence it has learned since childhood and for it to all collectively embrace violent, armed heroes as their own heroes instead and that is not likely to happen any time soon. Could happen — especially if or as we move into other quadrants — but ain’t the case today.
Also, by the way, Pro Tip: Do not ever try to claim that Salafi-jihadists like al-Qaeda and ISIS are liberals or socialists or whatever because they’re not. They’re violent Sunni fundamentalists. They see themselves as the true Sunni conservatives. If you try to tell an al-Qaeda or ISIS member that they are really liberals, they will behead you. They will hand you your head which you will not be able to hold because you will be dead. This has been a Public Service Announcement.
Which brings me to a Special Side Note of The Obvious for all those doomsday prepper types out there in the red states: Listen, I understand what you mean when you say you’re prepping to withstand and survive “civil unrest” but “civil unrest” ain’t gonna happen the way your fantasy says it will.
Sure, stock up on some canned goods and some backups of stuff in case of global trade collapse from tariffs and as companies minimize their risk from a capricious President — that’s only wise.
But if you imagine that “civil unrest” means that some antifa horde or Antifa-Ninja-Force-That-Doesn’t-Actually-Exist is someday gonna come out to your ten acres to try to steal your cans of beans then you aren’t paying attention. (1) Antifa like that seriously doesn’t exist, (2) they nonexistently ain’t gonna come out to your county because in that circumstance ain’t nobody gonna want anything out there, and (3) the only people you’re gonna shoot from your home fort are your friends and neighbors and other red state-rs, not liberals. So check your fire and allocate your ammunition stockpile expenditures accordingly.
Sigh. OK. Look:
What all of this means is that when liberals become elected officials and when liberals and some conservatives turn out in the streets across America, you know, five million at a time for a No Kings protest they aren’t trying to overthrow American democracy and they’re not being cute; they’re throwing their bodies between that Top Right Full Democracy quadrant and alllllll the other quadrants because they know that a great big protest and a great big public office is a great big target for a small man with a great big gun. Liberals have known for years that defying the dark and serving the public means risking their lives.
Minnesota was just this week’s proof.
A missing piece in the model is economic structures. Thriving capitalism or concentrated monopolies. Degree of inequality. These could be the foundation of your third dimension and the explanation for why people are happy or unhappy.
I'm so fucking sick of having antifa thrown around as a bad thing. My Dad and every other WWII veteran were antifa and I sure as fuck am antifa. These knuckle dragging trumplicans are all fascists and I'm happy to fight them. Right wingers aren't the only ones that are well armed.