“We have officially entered into the ‘fever dream’ portion of the campaign.” Jon Stewart managed to sum up the last two weeks in so few words at the beginning of his monologue at The Daily Show, but it’s hard to accept that this isn’t a dream. It’s hard to accept that Trump not only won, but won both the electoral and popular vote. It’s hard to accept that the party that should just be called the Trump party took the Senate and is projected to gain seats in the House.

It’s hard to accept that Trump’s going to go in with a rich red mandate, but it’s hardest to accept the popular vote counts. Trump got 62 million in 2016. 74 million in 2020, for reasons that still escape me. But he only got 71 million this election. He lost support. It wasn’t his race to lose. He was fighting like hell—not to win, just to stay above water.

Clinton got 65 million in 2016. Biden, 81 million. Harris? 66 million. That’s it. 15 million people decided that it was too much effort to go vote early, or to stand in line for a bit on Tuesday. Maybe they thought that their vote didn’t matter. Maybe they ignored decades of history disproving that notion, or maybe they were first-time young voters who didn’t get the world delivered to them in 4 years, so they decided it wasn’t worth trying this time.

15 million people aren’t going to be a monolith. All of the above, maybe. Sprinkle in some fool ‘progressives’ who have decided in their infinite wisdom that a total Trump win is better for the cause than someone who might actually give them the time of day. No doubt Bibi’s dancing on the roof of Beit Aghion right now.

A lot of people are likely cursing these non-voters. I feel the urge too, I won’t lie. It’s one thing to be a hesitant Biden voter because you typically go for the other side. Maybe you’re a non-voter who voted Biden, but this time around felt Trump was the better pick for reasons that would likely mystify me. You know what? At least they voted.

If you sat this one out, if you had the ability to go vote and chose not to, then all I can say is that this is proof that voting works. You chose to not vote, you and the other 14,999,999. Do you know who did vote? Trump’s supporters. A few million stayed home, but a hell of a lot more went to the polls when you didn’t. Why do you think billionaires spend so much money to support ad-buys, canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts in elections? Just for fun?

Elections aren’t decided by back-room deals in smoky rooms. They’re decided in the ballot box. The back-room deals are about how to sway voters, not how to ignore them.

It doesn’t matter now. The past can’t be changed, and this election no longer is; it was. We can learn from our mistakes. We always can, until the day we die. Will we? Will we even have the chance to? I look at what lies ahead of us. An entire political party, fueled by scorn of an adversarial ‘other.’ A party that embodies the will of one man, a man who does not speak to a majority of the nation—but those he speaks to, listen. They obey.

There was another political party like that in history more recent than many of us realize. Across the sea, they tried seizing power in 1923. They failed. They learned from their mistakes. They spent the next decade working to obtain power with methods more legal than a coup d’état. It took them six years after that to take their nation from a troubled democracy to the authoritarian state that so many of us know of, but very few actually understand. It takes a long, long time for a country to go from accepting immigrants to mass slaughter of undesirables. It is not quick, and day-by-day, it is subtle.

Make no mistake: we are Germany in 1933. We are not yet Nazi Germany. We do not have to be. Our democracy, as of this moment still functions. It worked exactly as designed—us opposed to Trump just didn’t have enough people show up this time around. In two years the midterms happen, and we can remove much of the power the Trump administration will have then if we vote. In two more years, we can ensure he or his successors have no power by voting again. And again. And again. If we keep this going long enough, we might even be able to undo some of the lasting damage done to the judicial makeup in our country—but it will take sustained effort greater than the effort they spent bringing us to this point.

Keeping authoritarianism at bay isn’t a one-time ordeal. You have to keep knocking down upstarts, because ideas don’t die. You can kill every Nazi that currently exists and destroy every record of every thought they ever had. A generation later, somebody will decide that a strong hand and fewer so-called ‘outsiders’ is what the world needs. Silencing the opposition just means they’ll work in secret and give you a nasty surprise down the road. Their ideas need to be bested out in the open, so no one can ignore the result.

Maybe you don’t like the voting options. That’s okay. Encouraged, even. If you don’t vote for anyone however, then nothing will change. Vote for the lesser evil. Then hold their feet to the fucking fire and don’t let up no matter how much they scream. You want economic reform? Peace in the Middle East? Defense of our values? Pick the candidate who makes you want to puke the least and give them both your full-throated support and your vote. Once they’re in office? Hold your continued support over their head like a guillotine. Make them sweat. Make them beg. Until the politicians are in office, us common people have no leverage against them. If they don’t win? They just try again! They’ve got nothing to lose. Once they’re in power, they have all of that to lose. That’s when leverage matters.

In fact, don’t think of it as voting for the lesser evil. You’re picking who seems like they’ll owe you more for your vote. Never forget that politicians work for us—but only if they get elected. Otherwise, they won’t even give us the time of day.

Trump does break this mold. It’s because he’s not a politician, he’s a demagogue. An idol. He’s whatever his supporters want him to be, and he doesn’t even have to change who he is. They fill in their own blanks. That doesn’t mean we need our own demagogue. It just means that we can’t count on him playing by the same rules as we do. We can’t show his voters the truth—all we can do is outnumber them at the polls, lest we have no other choice in the future but to outnumber them on the battlefield. That’s our future if we don’t make the changes that we want to see.