Abstract
For historically oriented political scientists [HOPS], the most important and difficult scholarly problem is how to employ historical knowledge to systematically envision pathways allowing for the survival and strengthening of democracy and the rule of law both in the US and worldwide. We here build upon our recent article, “Our Future at Risk: Toward an APD Scholarship of Foresight” (2022). As HOPS, we believe the immediate crises facing our polity deserve our focused scholarly attention and here we propose “reading history forward” by using the past to illuminate our future choices. At the intersection of literatures on both qualitative analysis and the political nature of time/temporal nature of politics, this essay focuses on the case of Barack Obama to propose as a first step to organize our forward reading by extending the “process tracing” technique forward in time, to enable “process projection,” in the interest of securing widely held normative goals that are seriously endangered.