Many aspiring authoritarians assume the grandiosity of history’s monsters as though immune to the unfolding tragedy that may ultimately consume them. The appeal is intoxicating. Power can be a drug as we know. Benevolent rule a luxury, most often inconvenient in the mind of the authoritarian, drunk on his quest for self-adulation and deification.

The audience likes the gaudy show, the pleas for sympathetic indulgence, the cries of the victim, the heinous intentions of those opposed. No paintbrush is too big to describe personal injustice.

Once you’ve convinced the crowd that it’s their pain, their injustice you represent, they become the noisy but docile crowd that no longer has to employ their own thought processes. What’s actually happening in the world around them can be ignored. Identity is stolen and the new uniform of obeisance becomes absolute. The ruler is free to commit any atrocity he sees fit, indulge his acolytes with any lies that preserve power.

Isolation is a consummate defense, a bunker mentality. With empathetic connections cut, the brain’s illusions abandon the host to the fury of his isolation. The enemy is everywhere other than within. Donald Trump’s whinnying self-pity before his supporters binds them to his ignoble treatment by the opposition.

With all his former colleagues indicted, the tyrant can begin from scratch. All the fumbling fools dreaming away their replacement theories have no real Republican Party to cling to, just the sycophantic noise of people who have no real programs or plans that relate to governing.

It’s all a show. Yet Trump’s supposedly ahead in the polls. Now marionette Mike Johnson takes charge of House Republicans as anodyne enough to service Trump’s blarney. It’s so unconscionable considering the huge issues facing us.

Megalomaniacal leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu bloom in the vacuum of Mideast paralysis while President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinkin try to sound like two-state solutionists “lite.” Bibi knows they will let him continue his nonsensical defense of a one-state solution, even though the world sees clearly it’s the worst of ideas imaginable.

The poll numbers show just how distracted the U.S. population is. I’ve said before, without facts there is only supposition. Rachael Maddow’s new book “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism” takes us back to the 1930s and ’40s tracing fascist and totalitarian movements with the personal specifics that give it character. Most disturbing was the number of congressional leaders who flirted with Nazism and antisemitism.

Roosevelt had his hands full, and entering World War II took facts on the ground and Pearl Harbor to convince the country that fascism was the enemy. The coterie that was ginning up huge demonstrations to the contrary got their ears clipped. But socialism had its followers, including my dear Aunt Nat, a card-carrying communist post-World War II. We didn’t hear from her for five years during the red scare and McCarthyism.

If Trump regains the presidency in 2025, we’ve already seen him bray about the dissolution of the Constitution, the assumption of absolute power, the persecution of all his enemies, Biden included.

How bizarre, how unconscionable that a presidential candidate can state outright his opposition to the Constitution and get away with it! That’s sedition. There are laws forbidding it. What have we become? Mindless zombies? What will it take?

Too many explainers are out there being descriptive, not enough fire in the chamber to awaken the people whining about more this than that, am I being given a voice, etc, etc. I can only think: Unite as one to put idiocy back into the box. Losing who we are and what we have is not an option.

When the imperfect, striving for justice, aiming for inclusion, seeking fair opportunity is threatened, we as Americans have to always take the higher road. Imperfect as our road had been, the essence has held because we knew working together in common cause would always serve our real needs, foster our greatest expressions.

It’s so hard for me to imagine a country with its guardrails removed. Isn’t the obviousness of historical parallels enough? Haven’t our schools taught us the richness of tolerance, the ability to act in mutual recognition of shared history?

Trumpists must think history a plaything of the gods, where our own powers of perception and purpose are no longer individualized, but sacrificed at the altar of the supreme leader: The free mind goes blank, the emotions become focused on opposition, demonization, and ultimately violence and death.

We have one year to reverse this tide of remorse and repression. Every conscious citizen must speak out, fear not the true expressions of love, gratitude, and inclusion that is our birthright. Never accept the illusion of power from without rather than our freedom of thought and action from within.

The hatred that fuels a soul like Trump must never be the fuel that deters or hides the sacred, the love that is our higher purpose.

Alan Harris lives in Shelburne Falls with wonderful wife, Jane. Find him singing in PVSO chorus, out with the Champagne Hikers, getting ready for winter and making chestnut soup.