Following a grueling presidential campaign and a gut-wrenching election night, our worst fears have been realized.

Donald Trump will once again be the next president of the United States.

The scale of Kamala Harris’s loss has been stunning. Not only did she manage to lose all seven swing states in the Electoral College, she is also very likely the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the popular vote to a Republican in twenty years.

Harris deserves much of the blame for Democrats’ defeat. She replaced an unpopular incumbent at the last minute, and instead of running on a radically different platform than her predecessor, she stuck to Biden’s extremely unambitious strategy. She refused to break with Biden on Israel despite the dire moral imperative of ending a genocide and the severe unpopularity of his position. She campaigned with far-right Republican politicians instead of shoring up support among the Democratic base. Perhaps most importantly, she failed to promise that anything of substance would change if she were elected president at a time when most Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo.

Despite the valiant and selfless efforts of millions of progressives and socialists to prevent Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Harris made it clear from the beginning that her campaign took the Left’s support for granted, and she repeatedly ignored its warnings that her centrist platform would alienate key constituencies.

The most radical utterance of the campaign, Tim Walz’s impromptu October 9 remark that the electoral college “needs to go”, was immediately shot down by the Harris campaign. The Democrats’ pathological aversion to risk has made their platform all but untenable, especially now that Republicans are on the verge of cementing long-term control over our broken electoral and political system.

Even though Harris’s tack to the center is clearly to blame for her defeat, the Left will suffer relentless attacks over the next four years. Democrats will use the party’s brief flirtation with mild social democracy in 2020 as a scapegoat, claiming the positions Harris was “forced” to take to compete in the primary that year poisoned her image with moderate voters.

Republicans, meanwhile, have plans to unleash a different type of attack altogether.

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Over the coming months, there will be thousands of articles in the liberal press detailing the exact kinds of harm Trump is likely to inflict on our country and the world during his second term. All of it needs to be taken seriously. He has promised to pursue personal vendettas and to use the military to crush protests. He seeks to purge the federal bureaucracy and administrative state of competent leadership and radically transform the national economy to suit himself and his supporters among a certain subset of the capitalist class. He plans to target millions of immigrants and refugees using a vast militarized police apparatus. He is likely to renege on his promise not to sign a law banning abortion nationwide. He and his inner circle have enthusiastically supported and even proposed expanding Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. He has pledged to actively sabotage the fight against climate change, primarily out of spite. And on and on and on it goes.

This is a grave moment in the history of American democracy. Trump will use the power of the state in unprecedented ways to target his perceived enemies and to entrench right-wing dominance over the American political system. Many of the freedoms we currently enjoy under the Constitution are likely to be curtailed, and some will be abolished altogether.

Democrats have spent the past five years assuring us that there is no “other side” to a Trump victory. Either the anti-Trump coalition wins, or democracy dies. There is no contingency, no plan to rally against the onslaught of nightmares we’ve been warned endlessly against.

And yet, we are still here.

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The American far right is gleefully preparing for what they see as their final victory, and much of their strategy depends on intimidating their enemies into silence. They want the Left to go into hiding, to flee the country, to stop speaking out for fear of retribution, and to abandon the political sphere to right-wing extremism.

In the frenzied time between this catastrophe of an election and Inauguration Day, we must guard against overestimating the power of the far right. It is easy to imagine that they are capable of anything, and the vague perception that they can get away with literally any crime and ignore all existing law will pre-emptively demobilize opposition to the incoming administration.

As soon as Trump takes the Oath of Office, the far-right will be hampered by its own unpopularity, infighting, and incompetence. Trump will surround himself with the same sycophantic and profoundly incompetent medley of toadies and conmen, and they will spend much of their time propping up a man who does not have the faculties to govern.

Trump’s return to the White House is likely to be a farce of Ronald Reagan’s second term, during which an ailing president increasingly unable to lead was puppeted by a ghoulish cast of right-wing charlatans. Unfortunately, Trump’s prospective cabinet makes Reagan’s rotating cast of misfits look like Boy Scouts. We don’t know exactly what horrible things they will try to do once the MAGA right grips the levers of power once again, but we must prepare however we can.

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Liberalism has proven once and for all that it cannot save American democracy. Neither Biden nor Harris considered any serious reforms to our economic and political system, not even vastly popular ones. The multiracial working class will bear the brunt of their failure to act. The only alternative to the coming barbarism is to organize.

We must join together in opposition to Trump’s efforts to undermine American democracy. The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, and it is committed to opposing fascism and supporting the working people of all nations. There are hundreds of other progressive and left-wing groups across this country that will take up the fight to defend our communities and our people. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, we have no option but to protect one another.

The coming years will be difficult. Laws will be written to target the most vulnerable among us. Democratic structures will be damaged and will not easily bounce back. Regional and global conflicts will intensify in ways that cannot be reversed. Environmental damage will be wrought that cannot be undone. People will die who cannot be brought back to life.

But we are still here, and we still deserve a better world. We have no choice but to press on.