In the second Terminator movie, Judgment Day, there’s a scene where the young John Connor is watching a couple little kids wrestle over toy guns and scream at each other, humanity in microcosm, and he asks Arnold’s cyborg “we’re not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean.” And Arnie says “it’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.”

Which, Democrats, right?

I’ve clutched my share of pearls, spent more than a few dark nights sweating terrified in bed, I’ve obsessed over polls, probabilities, pundits. And I guarantee I’m not alone. I guarantee there are millions of us who, seven months out from Election Day, are freaking out on the daily. Look at all the polls—they say that, if the election were right now, Donald Trump would retake the White House. And we’re waking up, brushing our teeth, going to work, all the time screaming inside, wondering HOW and WHY.

How on Earth could that spray-bronzed troglodyte, that mushmouthed mushroom-dicked moron, that apotheosis of every mean, low, dark, mealy, cheesy, pathetic trait of our national character, that silver-spooned Kallikak, plastered in cheap flake like a Dollar Store Baal, infomercialling redneck bibles and spray-gold kicks and bragging about winning his own golf tournaments like an infant who just discovered its own genitals, come anywhere within ketchup-flinging distance of Pennsylvania Avenue, especially after what happened LAST time?

It’s in our nature, we Democrats, to live in constant mortal petrification. And, fucking why not? The shit actually ALREADY HAPPENED. He actually beat Hillary Clinton. He actually hauled his flabby ass into the Oval Office, oozed sluglike down behind the Resolute Desk and Sharpied hurricane maps like a kindergartener, stared into an eclipse, gave Vladimir Putin repeated metaphorical (probably metaphorical. We don’t factually know for sure) blowjobs, and sent an army of orcs armed with bear spray and nooses and tasers to the Capitol so they could smear their own shit on the walls.

All this stuff HAPPENED. We’re RIGHT to be petrified. It’s like living with an abusive partner—there are periods of calm, of normality, of quiet and peace, and then BOOM there’s a Reagan, or a Bush, or another Bush, or a Trump, and there you are in the emergency room again, missing another tooth and bleeding from a kidney, telling the doctor how you tripped and fell downstairs, lowering your eyes so they don’t have to meet hers.

That said—and I’m not dismissing our terror, our trepidation, our pain and panic—if I were on the other side, the Fascist side, and if I were capable (as they’re not) of thoughtfulness and reflection, I’d be even MORE worried.

You all see what happened in Florida yesterday? The DeSantis-picked Supreme Court there reversed the state Constitution, and decided that abortion was no longer legally protected. In less than a month, abortion will be illegal in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy. That makes the Deep South monolithic in its anti-choice legislation. You get knocked up by your stepfather in Birmingham, or Jackson, or Ocala, you’ve got a long drive ahead of you, and if you’re poor or don’t have a license or are on probation for smoking pot, well, the Dollar Store still sells coat hangers. Good luck, girl!

So now there’s going to be a ballot initiative in Florida striving to enshrine abortion rights into the Constitution again. It’s a longshot—it takes sixty percent Yes votes to win, rather than a simple majority, and Florida is getting older and wrinklier and redder, and all those golf-cart codgers in the Villages and all the Mar-a-Lago lampreys and all the good decent White folks shaking in their lime-green slacks and orthopedic shoes, they’ll all be there to vote against. And the Actual Fascist Party in Florida outnumbers the Democrats by a LOT.

So it’ll take a ton of urgency on the good side, a ton of grassroots door-knocking, a ton of ads and commercials and placards, it’ll take money from the DNC and entreaties from President Biden, and since Florida has been the biggest cock tease (other than Texas) in the electoral singles bar for the last few elections, I can see the Democrats being leery of throwing money and effort at it—but it COULD happen.

Over the last couple years, every time abortion has been an issue, the Democrats have won, and sometimes won big, and sometimes won impossibly. We just flipped a seat in goddamn Alabama, you know? If I were a Republican strategist and I had some sense of reality, I’d be a little nervous, especially since the cadaverous unlikable Fascist Rick Scott is defending his Senate seat this time around, and he won by like five votes LAST time around, and if an extra few hundred thousand women show up to defend their bodily autonomy, you think they’re gonna vote for the guy who looks like the grandpa from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and who has voted repeatedly to put their uteruses into Republican conservatorship?

Then there’s the fact that the AFP, once again, has nominated, or will nominate, its worst possible candidates to run against the Democrats in important states. Bernie Moreno against Sherrod Brown? Kari Lake against Ruben Gallego? Tim Sheehy’s gonna be tough in Montana, and Larry Hogan in Maryland, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the Dems lost the Senate—but they might not.

Remember when Trump went down to Georgia to stump for his candidates, and both of them lost embarrassingly, throwing the upper chamber to the good guys, enabling the Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure Bill and the Chip Act and cadres of good, decent federal judges? That could happen again. This time around, Trump will be at LEAST under indictment, probably convicted of crimes, and it’s entirely possible he’ll be in jail come November. The RNC will have no money, and Biden and the DNC will have a ton of money. Young people, especially women, will have compelling reasons to cast their ballots. And, if history is any indication, the House will be holding its nine thousandth vote to elect a new Speaker.

Again—I’m not saying anything good will happen. I don’t think anything good WILL happen. I’m a Democrat. I expect to wake up in mid-November in the nascent stages of a fascist autocracy, and then in January I expect all the trans people to be disappeared, all the books to be burned (except for the Lee Greenwood Bible, of course), Putin to be brunching in Kyiv, and bubbas with rocket launchers to be stationed every two hundred yards along the Rio Grande, earning a sawbuck for every wetback they blow away.

All I’m saying is that, for all my terrors and night sweats and heebie-jeebies, the other side might find it wise to do a little worrying of its own. This IS America. It’s not EASY to impose Christian Nationalism, repeal basic human rights, withdraw from the world community, replace Constitutional law with martial law, and Make America Pray Again, especially when your Dear Leader is a demented late-stage syphilitic lumpsucker with the impulse control of a lobotomized Chihuahua. It’s doable—but it’s not easy. And, in spite of all the horror, it’s gonna be fascinating to live through.