Why Doom Might Be Wrong.

And why history is not inevitable.

Source unknown. And right.

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

… and one of those ways is to talk about why the last will be first.

So let’s go really dark — because things looking really bad right now — before we look at the longshot light.

A friend of mine threw Chris Armitage’s Substack post I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%.: Once they win elections, it's already too late. at me and said I’d darkly love it for Armitage’s scenarios for the future of the United States.

You should read it. You absolutely should. I’ll insufficiently summarize it here and then explain why Armitage is completely right as an historian and absolutely wrong as a futurist.

Armitage’s finding is that no fascist movement — once it’s elected — has ever been ousted without violence or without the tyrant dying, and only after decades of fascist rule. And that all the conservatives who believed they could hitch their wagon to a fascist movement to win power in the belief that they could “manage” the fascist leader after the fact wound up with bullets to the head, in concentration camps, or both within months or a year or so of when the fascist leader gained full power. Armitage looked at fascist rule and rulers in Germany, Italy, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, and Hungary and found the same in all cases.

As a result, Armitage boxes out garden-variety nonviolent protest and electioneering as ways ahead for the United States and instead says other forms of political force are the only viable ways now:

1. The blue states form their own competing political coalition in parallel to the federal government to preserve rights and deprive the red states of blue state money. (Remember that the red states are kept financially afloat by the blue states except Texas — which is probably about to flip blue.)

2. Americans across all levels of society should selectively noncomply with fascist rule by failing to keep adequate records or follow fascist orders — Oops, I forgot — in an ambiguous way like the Irish did to the Brits for a very long time.

3. Blue states should secede from the Union altogether.

4. Democratic governors should call in foreign intervention and election observers from free countries to embarrass and counteract fascist efforts in their states. Say, French, German, and Norwegian election observers and forces to counter-bully U.S. forces and ICE in California and New York and Virginia or wherever else.

That’s as much as Armitage can imagine. And that’s fair because we’re all limited by our own imagination. But that’s why as a futurist you try to imagine possible futures with groups of people if and when you can. Because nobody is as smart as everybody.

Armitage, for example, posits that once a fascist party is elected then it is too late to turn back the permanent possession of power because in all the cases he looked at those countries’ institutions and economies were broken to begin with and significant majorities had voted for fascists to be their saviors. But our institutions and economy aren’t broken yet and no significant majority voted for fascism here — a bare squeaker of a majority voted for him and thought they were voting for something else than what he’s become and done. And the United States is not like any of those other countries; we are our own kind of asshole.

This means there are at least three other strategies or futures ahead, and if any of them win we’ll buy another century or more for the American Experiment:

5. He and MAGA — via their own economic and Epstein policies and worse — alienate enough of the Republicans and the Independents they relied on to win in 2024 and won’t be able to ever again without them.

6. Americans demographically displace MAGA at the ballot box because young people are not willing to send their liberal or gay or brown friends to hell no matter what MAGA’s version of Jesus says.

7. The Supreme Court passes the rest of its rulings in favor of the unitary executive theory and makes an all-powerful, undeniable, untouchable Presidency — that a Democrat wins in 2028. And continues to win because the Democrats have a deep bench and the GOP is set to implode the day after Trump does. And — apologies to Voltaire aside — absolute power does not always corrupt absolutely. And if you don’t believe me then I will show you an Obama and a Warnock and a Buttigieg and a you and a me. And if you recall, our most popular president ever turned down absolute power and walked away from it and went back to Mount Vernon after his second term.

All of these, though, presume American elections continue and that he and MAGA don’t end them. And I don’t think he’ll end them. He may try but I think he will fail.

So if you scoff because you’re a cynic, I get it, especially when I look at these Democratic Party leaders.

But let’s go darker for a minute and say the United States of America dies soon because it right now that is a real possibility.

There’s an old line that the greatest invention of the mines was the miner. Well, the greatest inventions of America are Americans. And Americans do not need America to survive because America is an idea, and an ideal, and a hope, and an aspiration, and a model, and a call to make a better way. The American Experiment in the millennia to come might be remembered and obsessed over and studied and aspired to by future people the way we study the Roman Empire today. We’ll be the historical counterpoint for everyone forever to the idea that only a monarch and the totalitarian can be great and can govern well.

Those people of the future will study us and our contradictions and how the fight between our lesser and better angels was a dead-even fight until our better angels barely won each time. They’ll study Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and FDR and Martin Luther King, Jr. and how none of them, especially with their failings and flaws, should have ever succeeded. Not ever once.

And they’ll study us today, you and me, very closely and to find out why we failed this time.

Or.

They’ll study us because they’ll desperately want to know how — despite history and all precedent and armed only with elections and law and moral bravery and snark — we cracked the code of how to rescue a democracy and how for the first time somebody did it without war.

See, past patterns aren’t the best indicator of future behavior — that idea is just cynicism talking and futurists know that’s not true. The future is always different than the past and always ever was.

No one so far has ever succeeded at this before, though. If Armitage is right.

Guess we’ll have to be the first.