I’m often incredulous at Republican servility to Donald Trump. I’ve struggled to understand how people who’ve spent a lifetime chest-beating about patriotism can be so willing to burn liberal democracy to the ground to protect a man they wouldn’t trust to sell them a used car. So I’ve tried to envision a situation in which I might be tempted to do the same.

There’s no left-wing analogue to Trump in American life, but it’s possible to imagine such a figure. Picture an amalgam of Marianne Williamson and Hugo Chávez, a charismatic ideologue able to speak to the spiritual hunger of lonely, atomized masses. She enters the Democratic primary to elite mockery, but her rallies are huge and rapturous, and she holds crowds spellbound promising to cleanse America of its demonic legacy of racism and sexism. Her pronouncements are at once shocking and thrilling. She pledges to expropriate investment banks and to turn Mar-a-Lago into a homeless shelter.

At first Democrats freak out — her movement seems like a cult — but she wins the primary, and then the presidency, perhaps with an assist from China. Then she sets about trying to make progressive dreams come true. Stacey Abrams becomes attorney general. Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney and an icon of criminal justice reform, replaces Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Declaring a national health emergency, the president takes $3.6 billion from the military and gives it to Planned Parenthood. She orders the government not to do business with any company that advertises on Fox News.

It’s obvious to all but true believers that the president is unhinged; there’s an increasingly messianic, Jim Jones quality to the revival-like rallies she presides over. She spends a third of her time at her network of wellness centers, bringing much of the government with her and putting tens of millions of dollars into her family’s company. Conservatives scream that she’s a self-dealing demagogue. Deep down, liberals agree, but they love her appointments and don’t want to be tarred as privileged reactionaries. When the president announces a plan to unilaterally naturalize every DACA recipient, what progressive wants to be the one carping about executive overreach?