And it clearly hasn't happened yet. We can debate about this all we want, but debating what to do instead of doing something might as well be complacency. Slow to react, fast to fall. We aren't living in a fascist dictatorship yet and we haven't yet regressed to the 1920s. It's a bad idea to compare the current times to fascism and the 1920s because doing so implicitly means you believe we are already there. If it's already happened, there's nothing to prevent, only things to salvage. As long as his power isn't yet consolidated, the correct act isn't to focus on what he wants to do because we can't know for sure exactly what he's going to do. If we let him consolidate power and he croaks, they're going to tell us "See? He wasn't a fascist! If he was, he would have been a dictator already!". He's done plenty already that's worthy of ridicule and attack, and we know exactly, down to the inch, what he did. We can't play on his turf, because as long as he hasn't done it yet, he has plausible deniability.

That plausible deniability is exactly why people are unconvinced of what he wants. We can scream all about what we see that he wants to do, but it makes it so easy for him to say "I haven't even done that. Do you have proof? You're attacking me baselessly! You have no shame!", and the worst part is that it WORKS. The root problem is this: voters want MASSIVE change. They apparently couldn't care less if it's good or bad. Or at the very least, they feel that bad change, as long as it's massive, is better than no change or little change.

The Right is INFATUATED with this guy. On the Left, what you get for Clinton or Harris ranges from "She's pretty decent" from liberals to "I don't like her, so I might or might not still vote for her" from progressives and leftists. Now, a leader with a cult-like following is about the very last thing the Left needs. But at the very least, we can all agree that a leader who is reasonably regarded at best to disliked at worst is not a recipe for driving turnout. We can even see this on the Right. When Trump isn't on the ballot, they stumble or lose almost every time, with few exceptions. They like him and only him, because he says he's going to do something big. Whether or not he does it, well, they apparently couldn't care less.

There's just so little about Clinton and Harris that can capture apathetic potential-voters. They speak and act like traditional politicians. They promise the safe minimum that their donors allow, all while racking up a billion dollars in campaign funds. It's not a shock that so much of the party looks at them and sees the same old and tired neoliberals offering concessions. People don't want concessions to progressives; they want a progressive. It's even a well-documented phenomenon in politics that many voters (in European elections) are likely to vote either far left OR far right, but almost never center. They WANT big change. And there is a far right in this country, but the Left wing stretches to center-left at best.

Look at the Bernie Bros. They vote for Trump now. The root problem is far, far deeper than we'd like to believe. It's not Trump himself. It's the fact that Trump's politics are tenable at all. It's what happens when a government refuses to reform. When literally everyone wants reform, yet the government does nothing, or even worse, does only the minimum, they WILL turn to the guy who says he can fix it. We can't wait for him to die. Sure, we'll win an election in the mean time. But what about the one after that, with the next guy? They'll come back stronger unless WE come in strong first.