In one of his first protest rallies during what had been a very hot summer, some of his supporters clashed with police. One of them was caught on camera saying, if the police beats us up how will the revolution happen? He went on to add, famously, “we are wasting away in this heat.”

The complaint about being hot was silly but important for coming from a new kind of voice: from someone who absolutely didn’t expect to be beaten up by the police. But Khan’s young warriors do cheer when the police beat up other protesters or the army abducts its detractors and makes them disappear. Khan’s critics call them “youthias” — a riff on chutiya, slang for a jerk.

Social media accounts with Khan’s picture and his party’s flag are full of staggering misogyny. (His followers seem to take after him.) Many of them claim to be super patriots. Some say that Malala Yousafzai’s shooting in 2012 was staged and that India is sponsoring terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Khan’s new Pakistan was going to be a bit like Sweden and a bit like Singapore — or, really, like old Medina: According to him, all welfare state models are borrowed from early Islamic empires. He supports the blasphemy law and has defended the justice system adopted by the Taliban from Pashtun tribes.

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Khan’s opponents often chide him for his marriages and affairs, his character flaws, his spiritual confusion. But these things have rarely done harm to a male politician in the past. And Khan seems to think that he has enough electables behind him. That the Taliban listen to him even though they are reported to have threatened him. That he can knock down a corrupt system with the help of the politicians who built it.

Now, he just needs to keep the army on board.

Democracy was restored in 2008 after nearly a decade of Gen. Pervez Musharraf in power. But the decade since has shown that this model isn’t working. Missing persons’ cases are increasing. The media are censored at levels not seen even under dictatorship. And the Pakistani army would like to run the country the way it used to: It’s fine for elected politicians to cut ribbons at inaugurations but not for them to decide foreign policy or internal security.

But can Khan take on the military establishment, which still sits at the top of the food chain and is still fighting an eternal war against India and its own people, too? His opponents describe his supporters as “boot polishia,” those who lick the army’s boots. If Khan comes to power, like all prime ministers before him, he will try to wriggle out from under those boots. And that’s not likely to end well.

Khan seems to have walked out of a self-help book or a sports ad, but after an epic journey, he is finally knocking at the gates of power, ready to “Just do it” — whatever “it” is. Khan has politicized a whole generation, only to deliver it into servitude to Pakistan’s old establishment.