Where Is All of This Going?

And where will we be by the dog days of summer?

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to explain why these days I sometimes giggle maniacally in the middle of the night.

OK, while behind the scenes here at Think Future Central I’m still writing more on that particular group of people who won’t lay down and die I’ve also been chunking ahead a bit.

If you’re new here, “chunking ahead” is (my dumb term) for something professional futurists do: looking ahead at the things we know we will face ahead even though some of them are too soon to talk about. By looking at segments of time ahead — two or three or six months ahead in batches. And then to talk about what might happen after that. And talk about the stakes.

But right now I have more questions than answers so let’s question-chunk-out the next few months ahead.

(And I’ll frame these as a list of easily challenge-able statements. Or if-questions, rather.)

If this week’s elections — in which the left-leaning judge won the Wisconsin election to their Supreme Court and in which two Republicans won their Florida Congressional seats but by 20 points less than their predecessors won those seats only five months ago — mean that anger with the GOP is so strong that it cuts into GOP support even in their own strongholds;

And if his tariffs do even half of what every economist on the planet says they will do — cause prices on consumer goods to spike and drive a huge chunk of the lower middle class down below the poverty line through food prices alone and cause a recession or stagflation or worse;

Which reminds me, here’s a quick summary of all of that from Peter Zeihan, another futurist (or someone who’s futurist-ish-tic) which may be the best, worst, or scariest 9 minutes of anything you’ll see this week:

• Now, if you need that list again, he said that the tariffs will cause near-immediate recessions in the aerospace and automotive manufacturing sectors of Washington, Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. And those are not avocado-toast states.

• Also: Peter Zeihan records these videos from wherever he happens to be hiking that day which explains the What-the-crap-are-those-sunglasses?

And, even on top of that cataclysm, if the DOGE bros complete their attempt to rewrite all of the Social Security Administration’s COBOL-based code with another system that they’re using untested AI to do — an attempt that no observer thinks has a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding — and Social Security checks don’t go out this summer for a month or two or three for the first time in Social Security’s history, money that is the primary source of income for 40% of all elderly Americans especially in rural red state areas;

And if Congress loops back around and actually does pass his “big, beautiful bill” with all its cuts to Medicare which funds assisted living residences and costs for an enormous number of elderly Americans;

And even if Congress skirts disaster by passing new debt limits rather than let the United States default;

Where does that leave us by summer or fall?

Higher prices, empty produce shelves and more in grocery stores, lost jobs and recession, and Grandma has to come home to live with you and you won’t know how to care for her and you’ll be on YouTube trying to learn how — maybe? And the short-term-pain-for-long-term-gain will seem too little and too far away and the weight has already gotten so bad and you voted for better and no better has arrived and it doesn’t look like it will and no shiny new war will be a patriotic-distraction-and-deflection-enough to alleviate that your kids want bananas that you can no longer afford. And that your red rural county’s main sources of income — Social Security and Medicare and the salaries of federal workers nearby — are gone, crippled, or absent for months mean local businesses, hospitals, restaurants, and more will close and your farmers can’t sell half their crops because all the global markets are broken. Things that make blue areas scream and make red areas die and — no matter what bubble or media silo you’re in — you cannot be duped about any more and you cannot ignore. Not even if he sends his supporters in red states some relief checks with his name on them to try to shore up his support. Not for long.

And even more: if his supporters — who after decades of right wing media sabotage barely believe in elections, the law, courts, journalists, or the truth, or any other aspect or institution of American democracy — decide they must have change but conclude no legitimate avenue is left except a last flail at the ballet box and then there’s only the bullet box, what do we get? Maybe even long before the 2026 midterms because they think that’s too far away?

Which leads me to a few thoughts:

(a) The Zeitgeist seems to say that there’s only two futures ahead — that either He-and-They or The Resistance wins — but I wonder if instead there’s four: (1) America turns autocratic, (2) the Democratic Party pulls its shit together and magically rallies Americans and the world against him, (3) the Administration kills the economy and red states so badly that it suffers a revolt first from The Right and then from the Left, and (4) he suffers a cheeseburger-related health event such that he’s removed from office and then The Right and The Left steamroll what remains of the Administration.

And yes, I know the first looks likely and the final three look laughable but still, stranger things have happened and will happen still. My point is that the future isn’t a binary; it’s open. More open than most folks can see yet. And I suspect GOP insiders have already figured this out and that’s why they’re terrified.

• If you noticed, Trump asked Elise Stefanik to remain in Congress rather than appoint her out of it and risk a Democrat being elected to her seat that she and he only won by +21 and they now think might not be enough to keep the seat in Republican hands if there were to be a special election. And the Democrats this week gained ground by +15 or so in two GOP strongholds and things haven’t even gotten really bad yet.

• Which is part of why the GOP is trying to break everything they can and pass everything they can as fast as they possibly can — while they still can.

(b) I’m also now doubly ignoring the absymally-epicly-low approval ratings for the Democratic Party now in the wake of this week’s elections not because I think the Democratic Party is functional or shouldn’t reform its burned-to-the-ground brand. Because it ain’t and it must. I’m ignoring those approval ratings for two reasons.

• First, when the party labels are stripped off and each party’s policy positions are presented to Americans blind both the Left and Right clamor for the Democrats’ policies by the fistful to a degree that the Right sometimes mistakes the Democrats’ policies as Republican.

• Second, this week’s elections have also shown that there’s miles of difference between belief in the Democratic Party and belief in the blue. Because this week even though the Democrat won one election and lost two in all three cases the blue punched the red in the gut so hard that the red will be pissing blood for a week.

And this week proved that the Democratic Party is not the blue. One is a mechanism and the other is an impulse. The mechanism and the brand may be broken but the impulse is still on fire and it has a century more fuel still to burn.

All of this is what makes forecasting so complicated and why the future is so uncertain and so deeply, deeply scary. And why these days — I suspect that maybe like you — my faith and my belief and my hope and my skills and my doubt are now all in the worst fistfight inside me of my entire life. And for the first time ever it’s finally a fair fight.

So every night around 3am — while I’m looking for things in the dark that it’s too early to believe — I bust out with

Hehehehehe hehehehehe.