Asklemmy

Well I’m no oracle, but I’ll try to paint a picture. Just know it’s mostly a creative exercise with some educated guesses.

The following pertains to the US, specifically, with a rough timeline of 30 years, and I’ve split them into groups based on probability.

Near guaranteed events

1. Global warming A rapid escalation of climate related urgency at international ballot boxes as the remaining climate deniers personally experience loss or discomfort due to climate change, which finally breaks through their solipsism, sending even the most complacent into bovine panic, at which point climate becomes a bipartisan issue, the-one-thing-we-now-all-agree-on-temporarily-maybe. All former climate denying politicians are dead in the water. New candidates have to make climate commitments to win. They show climate progress to obtain reelection. What follows is several years of large scale international efforts which likely include headline grabbing short-term cooling efforts like stratospheric aerosol injection and massive funding into medium-term measures like carbon recapture and storage but comparatively slow progress toward the long-term solution which requires a complete sustainability overhaul of big industrial sectors like global distribution and agriculture. Still, the panic and corresponding political urgency will remain until scared constituents are made to feel safe again. It probably won’t be a perfectly organized long term effort, but it will temporarily halt global warming until greenhouse gas levels can be lowered to sustainable thresholds.
2. Policy reforms will be numerous and significant especially in environmental law, tax code, healthcare, public welfare, education finance, campaign finance, and immigration and drug related legislation.
3. increased regulation of housing markets, speculative banking, and sustainable development, and the reintroduction of numerous consumer protections that were stripped away or have lapsed in oversight and new consumer protections that are simply overdue, like privacy initiatives.
4. Targeted reductions in law enforcement Continued de-escalation of the drug and immigration wars along with funding-driven restructuring, supplementation, and enhanced oversight of the state and local police.
5. Mass deprivatization of public infrastructure and services that are properly regarded as public works and critical systems such as utilities, telecom infrastructure, and perhaps most importantly, the penal system.
6. Education finance Significantly increased funding of all levels of education, including funding that privileges open access public research.
7. A political realignment which begins with the total death of the modern-day GOP and redistribution of the electorate to new party labels comprising different sets of issues some of which were contentious before but no longer, such as climate change, and some of which might be surprising, such as the reemergence of the “blue dog” democrat in the south. (The slow death of the GOP began years ago — they post-dated their death certificate with immigration and church-state issues in particular — but the longer their death is drawn out, the greater the number of years of unified democratic government and the more likely all of the following is to occur. Which means that, if the following potentialities are things you would vote for, you would hope the Republican Party expires LESS quickly, not more.)
8. secularization of government A gradual but far-reaching and hyperbolic trend toward secularization throughout the government and mainstream political spectra.
9. End of culture war A surprisingly abrupt and perhaps somewhat unsatisfying end to what today we call the culture war (but will probably be called something else by then).

Pretty likely

1. Judicial reform by a unified government, starting with expansion of the Supreme Court, and a constitutional amendment correcting its original design flaw of representing an unelected and virtually uncheckable branch of government (e.g. appointment of a new executive agency or legislative committee tasked with public investigation of suspected corruption throughout the judicial branch).
2. Implicit if not explicit blanket federal ed-loan forgiveness and a major shift in higher education to universal funding, starting with public institutions but ultimately encompassing any institution funded by the federal government.
3. Restoration of title IX enforcement, complete reversal of religious exemptions to nondiscrimination for federally funded institutions, massive crackdown on religio-political 501(c)(3) violators.
4. Repeal of legislation that explicitly codifies government corruption, along with a number of antidemocratic policies which institutionalize civil rights violations or enable race fixing, like gerrymandering. (This is extremely popular, and thus would be in the category above if it weren’t also guaranteed to be heavily opposed by career politicians until the final gavel falls.)
5. (Likely result of #4, but can stand alone as well.) Replacement of the entire lobbyist political infrastructure and legislative consultancy frameworks currently dominated by private special interest groups with strictly open public technocratic agencies driven primarily by federated open source software initiatives, leveraging public data access guaranteed by the federal government, and relying increasingly on learning models that are open and under public control by law, which can predict social outcomes of policy with a high degree of accuracy.

Likely but complicated mainly by either demographic interference (overlapping sociopolitical cleavages) or the sheer magnitude of political and/or logistical effort involved:

1. Universal basic income, starting with an overhaul of social security and gradual expansion to a more efficient, just, and economically expedient system of entitlements that replaces most if not all the ancient bloated welfare programs based on corrupted, unfair, or deliberately unnavigable means-testing frameworks.
2. Phase-out of the overburdened and highly insecure SSN-based national identity verification systems
3. Federal adoption of more secure personhood and identity verification technologies which will enable
4. The rise of digital democratic participation and compulsory voting
5. Abolition of the federal electoral college and rise of referendum voting for most regional legislative policies
6. The rise of ranked choice voting systems, as an intermediate step to what is arguably the most impactful development on this list, measured over time…

Likely but maybe beyond the 30 year timeframe

Full constitutional redefinition of US electoral systems from single member district majority to a modern multi member district plurality. That is, finally replacing our cantankerous, broken, and highly unrepresentative electoral system, doomed by Duverger’s law to an endless battle of red vs blue, with a modern proportionally representative coalition governance.