I didn’t see it coming, either. And a nasty surprise it is, for like Britain’s vote to exit the European Union, the vote for Donald Trump was a huge step forward for the far Right despite whatever attempt there was to strike back against elites, however incoherently.

Perhaps we should never under-estimate the Democratic Party’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Before we dwell on the backlash, a quite possibly violent backlash, sure to come down on the heads of activists, there are two unanswerable questions to ask.

First, what would have happened if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic standard-bearer instead of Hillary Clinton? Polling during the primary season consistently showed Senator Sanders doing much better than Secretary Clinton in theoretical head-to-head general-election match-ups.

There are many who believe the former would have so slandered as a ‘socialist’ that he’d have had no chance, but the power of that word to be a bogey is waning, particularly among younger voters. He described himself a ‘socialist’ (even if he’s not) during the primaries as well.

Mr. Trump did not win with only White supremacists, tea partiers and the rest of the Republican base. He wouldn’t have won without the surge of support he received, particularly in the Midwest, from people who were just plain old pissed off and wanted a change, any change. Many of these voters would likely have gone to Senator Sanders as the vastly more rational and coherent candidate.

Secretary Clinton was the embodiment of the establishment in a year when elites are in the cross-hairs. Misogyny surely played a significant role here as well, and perhaps that in itself was enough to make the difference.

Second, did Mr. Trump actually win? Let’s ask this question seriously. Many states use unaccountable electronic voting machines with no paper trail, and these are mostly supplied by a small number of manufacturers who closely guard the software code.

Mark Crispin Miller, in his book Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election amassed a wealth of detail to argue that George W. Bush’s re-election was stolen via voting machines in multiple states. Some of those machines are still in use. Then there were the attempts across the country to suppress voter turnout, in North Carolina and elsewhere.

Could a couple of percentage points here and a few percentage points there have tipped the difference in enough states? We’ll never have a definitive answer, but it might be said that if the race hadn’t been close, there would have been no opportunity for any such cheating, if it happened.

In 2008 and 2012, were there any such tampering, the result would have been no more than a reduction in Barack Obama’s margin of victory.

The egomaniac and the thugs who follow him

Regardless, Donald Trump is president-elect. I never imagined writing or uttering such words. His first target may well be the Republican Party establishment, against whom he is likely to wreak revenge for not supporting him. That, however, would provide no more than a brief respite.

For we know who his real targets are – he made it abundantly clear throughout his campaign. And remember the thugs who hang out with him – the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie.

A criminalization of dissent is coming our way, and if I had to guess Black Lives Matter is a likely candidate to be the first target. There will be many more, ranging across the spectrum of Left activism, from Dreamers to abortion-rights activists to environmentalists to organizers fighting racism and police brutality.

Make no mistake: Those on the Left who blithely declared Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump the same, and maybe the former even a little worse, are likely to find otherwise.

Secretary Clinton is a war-mongering Wall Street-pandering technocrat who, rightly or wrongly, accrues some of the fallout from her husband’s presidency, when he proved to be the most effective Republican president we ever had, implementing policies Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush could have only dreamed of doing. Of course she is no choice. But had she won as expected, the room of grassroots activity would have been larger than it will be under a Trump White House.

Given the enormous number of areas where vigorous defensive actions will be necessary, and the heavy police-state repression that is sure to rain down on dissenters, there will be little if any opportunity to go on any offensives.

Consider this statement by Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, who said of the election: “I am not voting for candidates. I am voting for terrain.” National Women’s Liberation said:

“Under Clinton the terrain will be difficult for us, as well as the targets of her hawkish foreign policy. To get the things women need, we need a lot more than a woman president, we need a strong movement making bold demands, much bolder than anything in Hillary’s platform. But making bold demands under a Hillary Clinton administration will be a lot more likely to build into a powerful, effective force than it will if Donald Trump is elected.”

Let’s not sugar-coat this: The next four years are going to be very dark. Although I wouldn’t call the Trump campaign fascist, I do believe we can see it as constituting the seeds for a potential fascist movement. That is more than scary enough – and that retrograde movement will now have the power of the state behind it.

The breakdown of an economic consensus

As awful as Secretary Clinton is, a Trump White House will be something beyond the ordinary neoliberal prescriptions. The first election I ever voted in was Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory, one also unexpected. That had been a dead heat going into the final weekend, in days when polling was nowhere near as obsessive as today.

I still remember the chill of horror that went down my back as I emerged from an event to look up at a television announcer proclaiming a “tidal wave of red” spreading across the map. I had not thought United Statesians would really vote for him, but they did, lulled to sleep by his ability to tell people what they wanted to hear, no matter how at variance with reality.

Looking back across the decades, as immediately disastrous as the Reagan years were, we could not grasp the enormity of what had happened: His election, along with Margaret Thatcher in Britain the year before, inaugurated a whole new era, one that would later be coined ‘neoliberalism’ as the post-World War II Keynesian consensus definitively was brought to an end and class war sharply intensified.

The world’s capitalists brought about this change in response to their no longer reaping the profits they were accustomed to in the 1950s and 1960s. Reagan and Thatcher were the human material embodying a new era and dragging the political sphere into a tighter domination by industrial and financial elites: an era when the traditional balance between industrialists and financiers was upended and financial capital gained the upper hand among elites.

Neoliberalism is now breaking down. Rosa Luxemburg’s formula looms large for us today: socialism or barbarism. Or call it a better, more democratic world or barbarism if you prefer. As neoliberalism begins to break down, and working people around the world increasingly chafe at their conditions, they are seeking to punish elites with whatever limited means they have.

This justifiable anger could be channelled into organized activity, in which social movements cohere and join together to effect the structural changes that are necessary and eventually push toward a wholly different system.

Barbarism is no longer theoretical

In the absence of such movements or a coherent Left, the Right fills the vacuum, lashing out at scapegoats and seeking saviors in demagogues, even a demagogue whose real estate career is based on screwing working people like those who voted for him and not paying taxes, again unlike those who vote for him but have so much less.

The Right has the money, control of the corporate mass media, institutional support and vast means of decisively influencing opinion-making. Mr. Trump received more than a year of favorable publicity by the corporate media, but nonetheless his ability to bamboozle so many is a monument to the lack of education and anti-intellectualism that is so prevalent in the United States.

Given his own ignorance and lack of any program beyond enriching himself, coupled with his open racism, appalling misogyny, virulent nationalism, shallowness, lack of maturity, thin skin, inability to empathize with other people, encouragement of violence against opponents, eagerness to give carte blanche to the police, encouragement of nuclear-weapons proliferation and outright denial of global warming, it is no stretch to declare Donald Trump the biggest danger we’ve ever faced in the White House.

Barbarism has become less theoretical. The time to begin organizing is now, before he takes office and command of the world’s most deadly security apparatus. We either demonstrate strong resolve against authoritarian rule, sure to be led by some of the most vicious right-wing operatives around, or a Trump White House is going to unleash repression on a scale not seen in decades.

There is no more room for indulging ultra-left phrase-mongering: We have a clear and present danger. Stand up for whoever is first in line, for eventually they may be coming for you.

Pete Dolack is an activist, writer, poet and photographer, and writes on Systemic Disorder. His book ‘It’s Not Over: Lessons from the Socialist Experiment‘, a study of attempts to create societies on a basis other than capitalism, has just been published by Zero Books.

This article was originally published on Systemic Disorder.