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Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, a raft of self-help books and articles appeared, written by students of post-Soviet society. Drawing on lessons gleaned from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, these authors sought to supply Americans with a manual for thwarting Trumpism. In The New York Review of Books, Masha Gessen published an essay titled “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” The Yale historian Timothy Snyder churned out a best-selling pamphlet, On Tyranny, a step-by-step guide to resistance.

The core lesson these writers hoped to impart was the necessity of sustained outrage. “It is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock,” Gessen instructed. Without outrage, they warned, apathy would set in. And once that happened, autocracy would seem as natural as the forest.

Those warnings were stirring, and they helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump. Those who embraced this style, and their critics who facetiously mocked it, began referring to the “Resistance.” Although the Resistance harbored grifters and occasionally flirted with conspiracy theories, it also worked at the time. Pressure from the Resistance bolstered institutions, especially segments of the media and the Democratic Party, that might have plausibly buckled as Trump attempted to impose his will. And it supplied the electoral energy that helped the Democrats win at the ballot box in 2018 and 2020.

In the closing weeks of this election, I can’t help but recall the very different mood that prevailed four years ago. Back then, many journalists acted as if the prospect of a second Trump term was a national emergency, necessitating unrelenting negative coverage of the incumbent. Voting was portrayed as an act of heroism, because of the raging pandemic. Even if Joe Biden provoked little affection, his campaign felt to his supporters like the culmination of a liberation movement.

On the cusp of Trump’s potential return to power, the Resistance now feels like a relic of another era. The sense of outrage, which carried Biden to victory, is not what it once was. Pollsters privately suspect that this election will have lower turnout than the last. Organizers canvassing for Vice President Kamala Harris say that they encounter widespread indifference among progressive voters, especially the young. Segments of the elite that once proudly opposed Trump have made peace with him.

At a certain point, some humans, even the richest and most powerful, simply give up. The most graphic illustration of this is Jeff Bezos. In the years after he bought The Washington Post, the Amazon founder seemed to bathe in the praise that his paper received for its coverage of Trump. He paid for glossy Super Bowl ads, blaring the paper’s new motto, “Democracy dies in darkness.” By financing journalistic resistance to Trump, he whitewashed his own growing reputation as a rapacious monopolist. He became a darling of the Washington elite and a heroic figure in some journalistic circles. But he also suffered Trump’s lashings and retaliatory threats against his business.

Two presidential elections later, Bezos has made a different choice. Last week, he vetoed a Post editorial endorsing Harris, just before its publication. After 11 years of owning the paper, he broke with tradition and suddenly decided that the Post should no longer put its weight behind a presidential candidate. He later supplied a high-minded justification for his meddling, which mostly blamed journalists rather than autocrats for widespread mistrust of the media, but it wasn’t hard to interpret the psychology at play. In his mind, and for the sake of his balance sheet, resistance is no longer worth it.

[Read: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.]

Outrage is a transient emotional state, almost impossible to sustain over the years, because it’s so draining, both physically and emotionally. (Gessen and Snyder warned about that, too.) And Trump has a special talent for provoking exhaustion, because he’s such an all-consuming figure, with a unique ability to spike his critics’ blood pressure and populate their nightmares.

Another reason outrage has faded is that Biden won the last election. He campaigned on the promise of returning the nation to normal, and so the establishment reset itself to neutral. The belief that the nation had escaped Trump gained purchase in much of traditional media, especially after the January 6 attack. The Trump era resulted in a break from the profession’s norms; it demanded an uncharacteristic spirit of partisanship and emotionalism. But with Biden’s arrival in the White House, a broad swath of media attempted to restore its impartiality, to reclaim whatever authority it might have sacrificed in its combat with Trump.

Having reverted back to their old ways, many outlets were somehow caught unprepared for Donald Trump’s return. They have been painfully slow to describe the even more autocratic version of the man who has emerged in this campaign, who is running on far more explicit pronouncements of his authoritarian intentions. It’s hard to quantify the tilt of news coverage—and easy to overstate its influence. But there’s a pet phrase that recurs in news stories that captures the inability to grasp the danger: The press likes to describe Trump’s “old grievances,” which implies that he’s merely playing back his greatest hits, more of the same old anger. But that downplays the novelty of Trump’s promise to unleash the military on “enemies within.” Or the fact that, as my colleague Anne Applebaum has noted, his rhetoric has come to resemble that of Hitler and Mussolini. On the merits, this warning should crowd out every other story in the campaign.

Hardly a sector of society is immune from the onset of apathy. It exists within the business elite, embodied by Jamie Dimon and Bill Gates, who can’t be bothered to publicly announce their private opposition to Trump, perhaps because it might somehow cost them. It exists within the segment of the left that has decadently announced that it can’t stomach voting for Harris because she hasn’t been sufficiently outraged by the war in Gaza, as if democracy at home wasn’t hanging in the balance.

I’ll admit, shamefacedly, that I feel a measure of apathy myself. The prospect of a second Trump term is a nightmare that I’d rather not ponder, a fear that I’d rather repress. If I didn’t have a professional obligation to obsess over this election, I would be hiding in escapist entertainment. But that would just be a less destructive version of Bezos’s selfishness.

In this final stretch of the campaign, there are glimmers of outrage. According to NPR, 200,000 Washington Post readers have canceled their subscriptions to protest Bezos’s decision. In the long run, that boycott might self-destructively imperil an essential institution. In the short run, it’s evidence that a meaningful portion of the electorate is unwilling to sleepwalk into a second Trump term, a hopeful indication that the cloud of apathy might, however belatedly, be lifting.

The Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov was a zealous defender of all human rights, but there was one he spoke about as a first among equals: the right to emigrate. This was, he wrote, “an essential condition of spiritual freedom.” The power to vote with your feet, to exit if you so choose, gave the individual a veto over the state. So many other rights are important for an open society—expressing your political views, worshiping freely, assembling without constraint—but all have much less meaning if (as in the Soviet Union) you can’t even decide where to live.

I find myself, in these nail-biting days before the election, prioritizing in much the same way. What rights matter most? What conditions are necessary for a democratic society to exist and persist? What material makes up the floor on which we all stand?

The freedom to dissent ranks near the top for me—and reading the recently published memoirs of Alexei Navalny, an intellectual descendant of Sakharov, only made it seem more precious; you can pay with your life under a government that cares little for this freedom. Luckily, we in the United States live—for the time being—in an open society, and if you want to know what dissent looks like in such a society, the past year has offered a pretty good illustration. The American left, in its anger over the administration’s laissez-faire approach to Israel—and in response to the horror taking place in Gaza—has protested loudly, disruptively, and without cease. Certainly there have been excesses, but these activists have also shown very clearly that, in a democracy, protest can shift opinion (if not yet policy).

But I’m also afraid that these dissenters—progressives and, crucially, hundreds of thousands of Muslim Americans in those all-important Midwest swing states—are approaching the election with a self-defeating plan, one they surely think of as a continuation of this protest. It is not. By neglecting to consider democracy’s basic conditions, they might end up undermining their ability to ever protest again.

They are livid over Kamala Harris’s steady military support for Israel, and they are grieving over the tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza. We have all spent a year watching unrelenting carnage—and for Arab American voters in particular, the victims in the rubble are (or could be) friends and family members. Their attitude is not just ideological. It is visceral. It is personal. “I feel very guilty,” one Michigan voter, Sereene Hijazi, told The New York Times. “A lot of Arab Americans feel guilty because, like, we’re here, we’re safe, but it’s our tax dollars that are killing our relatives and people we know.” As a response, Hijazi has made her choice for 2024: the third-party candidate Jill Stein.

[Read: How the Trump resistance gave up]

This is the plan: Either opt out of voting, choose a third-party candidate, or pull the lever for Donald Trump, all as a form of protest. Any of these choices would, if they happened on a large enough scale, have the effect of swinging the election to Trump. If that seems unlikely, consider the fact that one activist is already taking credit for pressuring a national newspaper to pull a Harris endorsement. Nika Soon-Shiong, the daughter of the owner of the Los Angeles Times, has said that her father’s controversial decision was “an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.” (Patrick Soon-Shiong has denied that his daughter had any influence over his move.)

For some, their protest vote or abstention will be a matter of revenge, punishing Harris for her position. And as an emotional reaction to mass death, this is understandable. But these voters would also be punishing themselves. Regardless of whether you think Trump would do more to protect Palestinian lives—an absurd notion, on the evidence—a more fundamental issue is at stake.

Many of Harris’s rallies have been interrupted by demonstrations. A protest was set up outside the Democratic National Convention to demand that a pro-Palestinian speaker be allowed to address the delegates (a request that was denied). Campuses have been boiling over with encampments, occupations, and physical confrontations. If this year of protest has not nudged policy much—though Harris’s rhetoric is noticeably different from Joe Biden’s in many respects—it has lodged the issue of Gaza in the American consciousness. A recent Pew poll from early October found an uptick since last December in the number of Americans who think Israel has gone too far in its military response.

In other words, protest matters. But we should not take for granted that we will always be able to protest. Trump has made it clear how he views dissent. He has mused about throwing protesters in jail. He wants to revive the 1792 Insurrection Act so he can sic the military on those who might object to his policies. His defense secretary Mike Esper said that Trump proposed shooting demonstrators in the legs during the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd.

This avowed, even gleeful, willingness to violently suppress any dissent from what Trump calls the “enemy within” is the main reason 13 of his own former staffers signed a letter warning about Trump’s “desire for absolute, unchecked power.”

[Read: The people who don’t read political news]

Back in May, when Biden was still the Democratic candidate for president but the progressive anger was no less intense over Gaza, Jewish Currents, a progressive magazine, organized a panel discussion for those on the left unsure of how they might vote in the upcoming election. One comment, from Waleed Shahid, the former spokesperson and communications director for Justice Democrats, cut through the tone of sorrowful worry. When he was asked whom he would vote for if he was living in a swing state, he didn’t hesitate with this answer: “When you’re voting for an elected official in this country, you are voting for the conditions under which you would organize.”

Those conditions should be front of mind; they make everything else possible—and there is only one way to guarantee them.

To those who think that Trump would prove to be a better choice for peace in the region and the fate of Palestinian lives, I’m not sure what to say. His entire approach to Israel can be boiled down to what he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a call this month: “Do what you have to do.” Forget caring about Palestinian lives; he has reduced the very word Palestinian to a slur, lobbing it at his political rivals. I would like to remind Amer Ghalib, the Muslim mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, who is endorsing Trump because of the former president’s vague promise to “end the chaos” in the Middle East, of two words: Muslim ban. This policy of excluding anyone from a Muslim country, even tourists, from entering the United States is now one Trump wants to expand.

And if this isn’t convincing enough, remember that there are factions that would apply pressure on President Harris over this issue. If the country is inching toward a more pro-Palestinian stance, the struggle will take place within the Democratic Party. Harris is movable. Who among the Republicans will put pressure on Trump to care about Palestinians? Tom Cotton? Marco Rubio? Stephen Miller?

Gazans are still dying. And this makes it hard to think first about maintaining democratic norms. The instinct is to scream, which in this case might mean choosing Stein or Trump or no one at all. But a scream is a reflex, not a strategy. The left and those who care about the Palestinian future need to live to fight another day on this issue, and to do so they need to exist in a country where it is possible to fight at all.

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