How the Republic Might Be Saved

Futurecasting the tipping points of autocratic regimes, and how the U.S. could rebuild after collapse

by Julian Scaff

History moves in cycles of creation and decay, and every repressive regime, no matter how absolute it appears, carries within it the seeds of its own undoing.

In a previous essay, “How the Republic Was Lost: A Futurecast,” I explored a plausible worst-case scenario, one in which the United States succumbs to authoritarian consolidation between 2025 and 2028. In that future, the institutions of democracy rot from within: elections become coronations, courts and media are captured, dissent is criminalized, and the republic dies not in violence but in ritual. It is a future that remains chillingly possible, given the current trajectories of power, inequality, and climate collapse.

Yet the future is never singular. In this new essay, I imagine a different path, one in which the same forces that drive collapse also generate resistance, renewal, and ultimately, the re-founding of the American experiment itself.

If Project 2025 and the current regime succeed in consolidating power, turning the United States into a de facto dictatorship by 2028, it will not be the end of the American experiment. It will mark the end of one phase of that experiment, and the beginning of another. The United States has remade itself before: after the Civil War, after the Great Depression, after the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

Each time the nation’s political system fractured under pressure, it was rebuilt around a new social contract. The same will happen again. For those who have faith in the resiliency of the United States, the question is not whether the Republic can be saved, but when and how the next one will be born.

The Broken Machine

The American system of government, conceived for a small agrarian republic in the 18th century and jury-rigged for a global empire in the 20th, is now structurally incapable of managing the 21st. The machinery is corroded: Congress is paralyzed, the judiciary politicized, the executive swollen beyond constitutional proportion, and most of the people in power only represent the elite class.

In both the 2000 and 2016 elections, the losing candidates, George W. Bush and Donald Trump , were nevertheless crowned president by the arcane arithmetic of the Electoral College, while a malapportioned Senate continues to distort representation by concentrating power in conservative, low-population states, and a Supreme Court increasingly rules from a position far removed from the values and will of the American majority. Most Americans do not understand the structural problems, but sense that the system is unfairly rigged against them.

Economic inequality is the highest since the Gilded Age. Federal debt has ballooned to unsustainable levels while the social safety net is being intentionally dismantled. Climate disasters now strike with such frequency that they are no longer “extreme events” but a new background condition of life.

In such a brittle system, authoritarianism is not an aberration; it is a symptom. When democratic institutions fail to deliver security and fairness, people trade freedom for order. Yet, as history shows, autocracies carry the seeds of their own demise.

The Tipping Points

Drawing from the work of political scientists and historians, Erica Chenoweth, Peter Turchin, George Friedman, and Ray Dalio, we can map the fault lines where regimes crack. These scholars, from different disciplines, converge on a single insight: power collapses when legitimacy erodes faster than coercion can compensate.

Erica Chenoweth’s “3.5 percent rule” finds that no government in modern history has withstood sustained, non-violent protest by more than about 3.5 percent of its population. In the U.S., that’s roughly 12 million people. In 2025, the “No Kings” protests reached nearly half that number, a sign that discontent is building towards that critical threshold.

Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic theory predicts instability when three trends converge: elite overproduction (too many insiders fighting for too few privileges), popular immiseration (declining real incomes), and state fiscal stress (chronic deficits). All three are rising.

George Friedman’s geopolitical cycles place the 2020s within America’s once-per-80-year systemic crisis, comparable to the 1860s or 1930s, when the old order disintegrates and a new one forms.

Ray Dalio’s “Big Cycle of Empires” adds a macroeconomic lens: empires fall when debt, internal inequality, and external rivalry peak together. The United States is now at that intersection.

From these frameworks, a pattern emerges. Regimes do not collapse from ideology alone, they fall when debt, inequality, and illegitimacy align with a shock large enough to break elite unity.

The Shock That Breaks the Spell

Futurecasting forward, several plausible triggers stand out.

• A major economic recession, 2026–2028. Years of deficit spending, tax cuts for the wealthy, and deregulation lead to inflation, bond crises, and mass unemployment. Safety nets are gutted in the name of austerity. Public anger turns from abstract protest to concrete revolt, strikes, walkouts, refusals of service.
• An Election Crisis in 2028. If the regime attempts to manipulate or cancel elections too blatantly, it will rupture what remains of elite cohesion. Governors, courts, and military leaders could diverge in loyalty. Non-violent resistance including national labor strikes could swell past Chenoweth’s 3.5 percent threshold.
• The Climate Cascade, 2028–2032. Summers of cascading disasters, heat waves, blackouts, crop failures, and floods, exposes the regime’s incompetence. Federal relief collapses; state governments and mayors begin to act autonomously. The illusion of centralized control dissolves.
• Less likely, but still highly impactful triggers include events such as another (perhaps more lethal) global pandemic, large scale war (i.e. U.S. vs. China, or a large regional conflict that draws the U.S. in), catastrophic cyberattacks on infrastructure, a major global economic depression, ecological collapse that causes sudden food shortages, a military coup, etc. While the risk of these events is either low or unknown, their impacts would be high. Thus, I typically treat plausibility and impact as independent factors in futurecasting, so that we don’t lose sight of the rare “Black Swan” events.

When one or more of these crises hit, mass mobilization will reach critical mass. What follows is not civil war in the 1860s sense, but something closer to the color revolutions of Eastern Europe: non-violent, decentralized, technologically networked, and economically disruptive enough to paralyze the regime. The military, seeing its legitimacy evaporate, will likely step back rather than fire on its own citizens. As Dalio notes, coercive power fails not when the guns vanish, but when the people behind them no longer believe.

The Fall and the Rebuild

When the old order breaks, what replaces it will not be a restoration of the 20th-century model. The federal government’s structure, its baroque checks and balances, its dependence on lobbying and corporate patronage, its winner-take-all two-party system, is irreparably broken. The new order will emerge through necessity, not ideology.

I foresee a transitional government forming in the early 2030s, born of an uneasy coalition of governors, mayors, and civic networks. Power will devolve downward, away from Washington D.C., as states and regions form new compacts for energy, transportation, healthcare, and climate resilience. A new constitution, or what Friedman calls a “renegotiation of the Republic”, will codify these arrangements into a post-federal union: a system both more local and more networked, guided by transparency, circular economics, and planetary stewardship.

Economically, it will resemble a modernized New Deal, but driven by necessity rather than ideology. Massive public works programs for climate adaptation will double as employment guarantees. Digital Dollars and public banks will replace private credit monopolies. A guaranteed minimum income and universal healthcare, once dismissed as radical, will become pragmatic tools to stabilize consumption and social order.

Culturally, a new ethos will replace the cult of individualism with what I call mutualism: the understanding that survival and prosperity are collective endeavors. The pendulum of history will swing back from narcissism toward solidarity.

How the Republic Might Be Saved

Saving the Republic does not mean preserving the current one. It means re-founding it, as the generation of 1787 did after monarchy, as the generation of 1865 did after slavery, and as the generation of 1933 did after economic collapse. Each generation builds a new constitutional reality when the old one fails.

The next re-founding will come when enough Americans, roughly one in thirty, refuse to obey a broken system. The fall of an autocracy is never neat; it is chaotic, exhausting, and costly. But collapse is also a clearing, a space where the next society begins to grow.

Autocracies often entrench themselves through fear, propaganda, and the strategic use of violence, crushing dissent while rewarding loyalty to maintain an illusion of stability. It is conceivable that such a regime could cling to dictatorial power through 2036 or even 2040, yet its survival beyond the 2030s is doubtful given its internal contradictions, economic decay, and the mounting pressures of a planet in ecological crisis.

History suggests the decisive years will fall between 2027 and 2032. By then, debt stress, elite fracture, and mass mobilization will converge. The autocratic experiment, having overreached, will implode under its contradictions. From its ruins will rise a new Republic, one humbler, more decentralized, and finally ready to serve the planet as much as itself.

That is how the Republic might be saved: not by restoring the past, but by designing the next chapter of civilization.

References:

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

Erica Chenoweth, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Peter Turchin, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (Chaplin, CT: Beresta Books, 2016).

Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).

George Friedman, The Storm Before the Calm: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond (New York: Doubleday, 2020).

Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2021).

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work Stoppages Summary,” Economic News Release, February 21, 2025, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkstp.nr0.htm.

U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Monthly Statement of the Public Debt,” Fiscal Data, accessed September 2025, https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/monthly-statement-of-the-public-debt/debt-outstanding.

U.S. Census Bureau, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2024,” Current Population Reports, September 2025, https://www.census.gov/library/publications.html.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Overview, accessed September 2025, https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/.

“No Kings Protests,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed July 2025, https://www.britannica.com/event/No-Kings-protests.

G. Elliott Morris, “Crowdsourced Estimates of U.S. Protest Participation, June 2025,” The Washington Post, June 16, 2025.

The Guardian, “Millions Join ‘No Kings’ Marches across U.S. to Protest Trump’s Power Grab,” June 14, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/14/no-kings-protests-trump-military-parade.