The right should fear a progressive populist.

Trump has shown what's possible. The left will remember that.

Twenty years ago, if you’d asked a room full of political scientists to imagine which of America’s two parties would first fall to a populist insurgency, almost every hand would have pointed to the Democrats.

The conditions seemed ripe. The party had a restless progressive base, labour unions were still stronger than they are now, and there were live insurgent movements on the left – the anti-globalisation protests that lit up the late 1990s, the Iraq War marches, and then Occupy Wall Street.

The Republicans, meanwhile, looked utterly dominated by their donor class, by corporate interests, by a professional elite of neocons and technocrats. The idea that the GOP would one day be conquered by a nativist, ultra-populist insurgency would have seemed ridiculous.

They had the Tea Party, of course, but that was widely viewed as a noisy protest movement which the Kochs and their friends in the Chamber of Commerce had tamed and monetised. Nobody thought it could become the seedbed of Trumpism.

And yet here we are.

The “inevitable” left-populist moment never arrived. The “unthinkable” right-wing version not only happened, it did so in less than a decade.

The Republican Party is now, for all intents and purposes, a personality cult with Trump at its centre. And along the way he has proved something quite terrifying: a president who is willing to shred norms and wield power without shame can bend American institutions to his will in ways once thought impossible.

That is the real story of the last ten years, and it’s the one too few people are willing to confront. What Trump has shown, over and over again, is that the guardrails were weaker than anyone believed.

And once they are gone, they are gone for everyone, not just for him.

This is the thing his supporters and cheerleaders should be thinking about. They revel in what Trump has done – in his willingness to lean on corporations, to bully universities, to stack the courts with loyalists, to flout laws and dare anyone to stop him. They like the swagger of it, the way he has rewritten the terms of politics.

But here’s the point they miss, or pretend not to see: once you’ve broken the norms, they are broken forever. Once you’ve shown that you can govern with pure brute force, that becomes an option for the next person in the chair.

The precedent is set, the weapons are built, the constitution is bent, and it does not snap back into place. So, the right ought to be very, very afraid. Because the day might come when someone they hate just as much as they love Trump decides to use those same powers for an entirely different agenda.

Because imagine, just for a moment, what a left-wing populist could do with Trump’s toolkit. Imagine a president who didn’t give a damn about the niceties of Washington procedure or the hand-wringing of technocrats, but who was just as ruthless about power as Trump has been. Imagine a leader who didn’t back away from confrontation with corporate America but who leaned into it, hard.

Imagine a president who decided that climate change was an existential crisis and that any corporation not meeting net zero targets would face punitive taxation, executive action, even direct takeover. A president who looked at the housing market and said “enough” – who imposed rent freezes, broke up hedge fund ownership of homes, and redirected subsidies away from billionaires towards working people.

A president who treated healthcare as a right and strong-armed the insurance industry until universal coverage was a reality. A president who, like Trump, viewed the courts not as a sacred priesthood but as another battlefield – and who stacked them with judges who thought corporate power was the real danger to democracy.

Imagine a left-wing populist who saw right-wing organisations as an existential threat to America itself. Imagine a left-wing populist who was willing to grasp the nettle and take on the social media companies and attempt to rid them of hateful rhetoric ... and who would not allow those platforms to unite against the change.

All of this would be possible under the very same model that Trump has normalised.

The right doesn’t fear this, because they don’t believe it will happen. They believe, deep down, that the Democratic Party is too weak, too corporate, too in thrall to its donors to ever embrace a genuinely populist direction. They also believe that the left has a moral weakness. That it will never bend the rules for its own agenda.

They are very, very wrong.

To be fair, the last two decades give them reasons to feel confident. The insurgencies on the left have all been strangled in the crib or co-opted into mainstream technocratic liberalism. Howard Dean flamed out. Obama, who ran as a transformational figure, governed as a cautious technocrat. Occupy Wall Street faded without institutional support. Bernie Sanders was systematically kneecapped by the Democratic establishment.

The party still runs on Wall Street money and Silicon Valley largesse. Why would they suddenly turn into a vehicle for populist rage?

But that’s exactly the mistake everyone made about the Republicans. The GOP looked unassailable by outsiders, too. The donor class was thought to be in total control. The neocons had a lock on foreign policy.

The “grown-ups” supposedly kept the rabble in check.

Then Trump came along, ripped the whole façade down in a few short years, and the base cheered as the establishment burned. What once seemed impossible was suddenly reality.

The truth is that political parties are brittle things, far more fragile than they appear. They can collapse in on themselves very quickly when a charismatic figure and a restless base collide. If the Republicans could fall to Trump, why on earth would anyone think the Democrats are immune to the same dynamic?

If you look at the underlying conditions, you could argue that the Democrats are more vulnerable than ever. Inequality has skyrocketed. Young people are saddled with debt, locked out of housing, and watching the climate crisis bear down on them with no serious response from the political class. Unionisation is creeping back, and strikes are happening with a frequency not seen in decades.

There is, beneath the surface, a simmering rage against the Democratic establishment. If a figure emerged who could harness that – someone who had the charisma and ruthlessness of Trump but the agenda of a Sanders or a Warren – the party could be captured in short order. And that person would not arrive in a vacuum.

They would arrive in a world where Trump has already demonstrated that the presidency can be used as a blunt instrument, unrestrained by norms, unafraid of precedent. A leftwing populist would not be playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules. They would play to win, and they would do anything they thought necessary to do it.

Expand the court? Done. Change the electoral map? Just a matter of working with friendly legislatures. Break up the right-wing militia camps? Hell, that’s what the National Guard is for, and if they can police sanctuary cities they can sure as Hell go in and disarm and dismantle organisations designated as domestic terrorist groups.

ICE has been used as Trump’s private army. The FBI or the ATF or one of the other alphabet agencies could just as easily be turned into something to mirror it. And ICE itself would face dismantling, defunding ... and its agents subjected to prosecution under newly strengthened laws for everything they’re doing in the present day.

This should terrify the right. It should terrify corporate America. It should terrify anyone who has grown comfortable assuming that the levers of power can only ever be pulled in their direction. Because if the left ever produces its own Trump – a populist who believes in using the state aggressively but for progressive ends – there will be nothing standing in their way that Trump hasn’t already smashed.

The right likes to say “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” Well, they may be about to find out what that really means. Every institution Trump has bent to his will – the courts, the corporations, the universities – could one day be bent in the opposite direction. And the people who cheered as the old constraints collapsed will have no moral ground on which to object.

Of course, there are some who say this will never happen, that the Democratic Party is permanently inoculated against populism by its donor class. That’s possible. But then again, we once thought the Republicans were inoculated by theirs.

We thought the Tea Party would never amount to anything more than a pressure group. We thought a reality TV host could never beat the Bushes, the Romneys, the entire conservative establishment. We thought America was immune to the sort of populist waves that had swept Europe. We were wrong, about all of it.

Politics is full of surprises, and the one certainty is that today’s impossibility can very quickly become tomorrow’s reality. Ask anyone who laughed at Trump in 2015.

The great irony is that the right is building the machine of its own destruction.

By normalising authoritarian precedent, by celebrating the naked exercise of power, they are laying the groundwork for a future in which a left-wing populist does exactly the same – only this time, the targets will be billionaires, oil companies, landlords, hedge funds, and the corporate media. The tools will be the same, but the outcomes will be very different.

That is the lesson of history: you can build the guillotine to take off one set of heads, but once it exists there’s no telling whose neck will be next on the block. All it will take is a new hand to pull the rope. And one day, perhaps sooner than they think, that hand may not belong to the right.

So when Republicans cheer as Trump tears down the guardrails, they should pause and consider what happens when someone they despise sits in that same chair.

What happens when the rules they have broken are broken in the other direction? What happens when a left-wing populist decides to play the same game? They have weaponised the system. Well weapons have a habit on being turned on those who once wielded them. History is full of examples, and those in power never see it coming until it does.