Donald Trump behaves exactly how you would expect an American fascist to act. Photograph by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty

For the past months, and into this final week, as for much of the past year, many New Yorkers have been in a position that recalls parents with a colicky baby: you put the baby down at last, it seems safely asleep, grateful and unbelievably exhausted you return to bed—only to hear the small tell-tale cough or sob that guarantees another crying jag is on the way. The parents in this case, to fill in the metaphorical blanks, are liberal-minded folk; the baby’s cries are any indicators that Donald Trump may not be out of the race for President—as he seemed to be even as recently as last week—and may actually have a real chance at being elected. Disbelief crowds exhaustion: this can’t be happening. If the colicky baby is a metaphor too sweet for so infantile a figure as the orange menace, then let us think instead, perhaps, of the killer in a teen horror movie of the vintage kind: every time Freddy seemed dispatched and buried, there he was leaping up again, as the teens caught their breath and returned, too soon, to their teendom.

We joke because we seek sanity in an insane moment. For the idea that Trump might be elected is as crazy as the man is. Trump remains, as he has been all along, an open and committed enemy of liberal democracy and constitutional republicanism, and yet he is at most a few polling points from power. Indeed, we can be confident that, whatever the play of the polls this week, we will certainly arrive at next Tuesday with Trump retaining at least the chance that any candidate of one of our two major parties always has—a real one, with much depending on things that happen outside anyone’s control, often at the last minute, and in ways that cannot now easily be envisioned. Those are the stakes, and our emergency, our sleepless baby, our back-from-the-dead killer.

Come, the skeptic alongside or within us protests, surely this account is at least a little hysterical, or exaggerated. Can Trump really be that bad? And would he truly be unguarded by constitutional constraints? For haven’t we heard all this, or something too much like it, before? It has been a convention of our quadrennial liberal pieties, after all, to insist that _this _election is the one that uniquely matters, with repeated spectres of looming apocalyptic authoritarianism often (and perhaps too carelessly) invoked. People said the same things about Goldwater in 1964, and about Richard Nixon in that grim year of 1968. Even Ronald Reagan, now as comforting an American icon as Ozzie Nelson, was greeted in the summer of 1980 with fearful warnings about the dangers of putting the nuclear button in the hands of a shallow and untested actor. The country survived. Hell, the country thrived. Can the oafish and absurd Donald Trump really be worse?

Well, if one lesson liberals learn from 2016 is to be more discerning about the difference between bad policies and constitutional crises, between falling rain and onrushing meteors, it will surely be salubrious for them, and for us all. But, in truth, this time is different. Barry Goldwater worked within, and respected all the norms of, democracy—during his time as a senator, he and J.F.K. were not only friends across the aisle but talked of barnstorming together in 1964.

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” may not be a slogan all can embrace, but (to sound like Walter Sobchak, in “The Big Lebowski”) at least it’s an ethos—something to respect and debate, to argue over. The condition of the country in 1968 was surely worse than it is now, and Nixon had an inner life more paranoid than even now is quite believable—but he was also a normal politician who had followed a normal path, and when, in fact, his anti-democratic tendencies were revealed, he was expelled by the same constitutional order that he had betrayed. One never thought to have to say this in his praise, but Richard Nixon accepted the system that distinguished itself by ejecting him. And Ronald Reagan, whatever anxieties he awoke in the year of his election, could point credibly to his time as a successful two-term governor of our largest state. Meanwhile, the true previous American demagogues—Joe McCarthy and Huey Long and George Wallace—never captured the Presidential nomination of a major political party.

Donald Trump is not normal in any of these ways, and yet we continue to treat him as though he were. Those of us who warned last spring that he was being underestimated and “normalized” by a sinister process of gradual acceptance of the unacceptable turned out, tragically, to be right. Trump is not normal. Nothing about him is. One need only look at his rallies, track the rhetoric they offer and the vengeful orgy of hatred and misogyny and racism they induce, to see just how different he is. His followers are not, shall we say, there to root on their favored libertarian in his pursuit of free-market solutions to vexing social problems; they are there to scream insults and cry havoc on their (mostly imaginary) enemies, to revel in the riot of misogyny and racism that Trump has finally given them license to retrieve from the darkest chapters of our past. (“Not politically correct” means openly brutal to minorities and women.) A ten-year-old screams, “Take that bitch down!” to laughter. One need only track the past month’s series of outrages, each quickly receding into the distance, to recall that he has done not one but almost innumerable things that in any previous election would have been, quaint word, “disqualifying.” His Twitter assault on the former Miss Universe was followed by his confession and boasts of being a sexual predator, which were followed by the confirmation of numerable women that, yes, indeed, he is a sexual predator—met only by his snarling denials, none of them the least bit convincing, and the familiar big-lie technique of insisting that their stories have been “debunked” when they have not even been effectively denied.

The truth is that Trump’s “positions” on specific issues are more or less a matter of chance and whim and impulse (Of course women should be punished for having abortions! Ten minutes later: no, they shouldn’t) while his actual ideology, the song he sings every day, the one those listeners and followers gleefully vibrate to, is one anthem, and it is the sound of the authoritarian and anti-democratic impulses Americans have rejected since the founding of this country. Call them what you will—populist authoritarianism or extreme-right-wing ethno-nationalism—the active agents within a Trump speech and energizing a Trump rally are always the same: the worship of power in its most brutal and authoritarian forms (thus his admiration for Vladimir Putin and for the Chinese Communists who assaulted the protesters at Tiananmen Square); the reduction of all relations to dominance contests; the contempt for rational argument; the perpetual unashamed storm of lies; the appeal to hysterically exaggerated fears of outsiders; and, above all, the relentless sense of ethnic grievance that can be remedied only by acts of annihilating revenge. His is the ideology not of democratic patriotism but of a narrow nationalism alone—the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. He will “level the playing field” with the terrorist spectre of ISIS by forcing soldiers to commit war crimes; he will not merely kill our enemies but annihilate their families. His platform is resentment and his program is revenge, and that is an ideology with many faces and one name. This is fascism with an American face.