Forget about “left or right,” there’s only one thing on the ballot this fall: democracy (Democrats), or oligarchy that leads to tyranny (Republicans).

Donald Trump, the GOP, the 13 billionaires in his Cabinet, and the ~150 billionaires who made him president again are all on the side of oligarchy. And we’re already most of the way there, thanks to five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court.

As President Jimmy Carter told me 11 years ago:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.” [emphasis added]

Democracy is when the will of the people is regularly converted into policy and law by their elected representatives. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

“…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Oligarchy, on the other hand, is when the morbidly rich own the government and dictate policy, the “consent of the governed” be damned. We’ve been creeping in that direction since the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, when rich people stopped paying taxes, corporate consolidations exploded, unions were attacked and wages stagnated, and it began to cost a fortune to get decent healthcare or a good education.

But the danger of oligarchy isn’t just that rich people get richer and the rest of us get poorer, which has been the steady trajectory of the Reagan Revolution for 44 years. As I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, oligarchy is almost always just a transitional system.

It doesn’t last, because working class people eventually get tired of being ripped off by the morbidly rich. Which is exactly what we’ve been seeing with our political system for the past two decades: whichever candidate — the best examples are Barack Obama and Trump — who promises “change” gets elected, because the people are angry about the morbidly rich oligarchs having taken over the government and turned it exclusively to their own benefit.

In some countries throughout history, that anger is translated into revolutions and civil wars. More often, however, it follows the course it is on right now in the United States: extreme polarization, seizure of the news and political system by the rich to hang onto their oligarchy, and millions of frustrated citizens showing up in the streets.

As Jack London put it in The Iron Heel, the oligarchs “own the Senate, Congress, the courts, and the state legislatures” leaving the middle class’s supposed power as “an empty shell.” The rich and powerful boast, “We are the Iron Heel, and none can withstand us,” and insist that morality itself largely flows from “the class interests” and “feelings of superiority” of those on top.

Eventually, however, it gets more and more difficult for an oligarchic government to hang onto power because people hate oligarchy.

The government toadies of the oligarchs then must either move back toward democracy by making real concessions to the people like FDR did — giving them better wages, taxing the rich, making healthcare and education free or cheap, breaking up the monopolies — or they have to clamp down and put an end to the protests.

We’re seeing that being played out right now in America, as protestors are beaten, gassed, arrested, and even murdered right in front of us, with the agents of the oligarchs — ICE in this case — suffering no consequences whatsoever.

Similarly, Trump just tried to get six members of Congress thrown into prison for saying that military people shouldn’t follow illegal orders, which actually is the law of the land. Don Lemon is being arraigned for daring to do his job as a reporter. In a spectacle resembling Russia or Belarus, the regime’s goons now gas, beat, and kill people with absolute impunity.

This is how every tyrant in modern history — from Germany in the 1930s to Russia in the early 2000s to America today — makes the transition from democracy to oligarchy and finally to absolute tyranny.

Germany called them Brownshirts. Russia called them Rosgvardiya or the KGB/FSB, and here in America we call them ICE. They’re the shock troops, loyal exclusively to Dear Leader, whose job is to crush public dissent on behalf of oligarchs who, like Fritz Thyssen in 1930s Germany, believe turning the country into a dictatorship will make them even richer and more powerful.

Elections still happen, flags still wave, politicians still give speeches about freedom. But the real power concentrates at the top and, when the people begin to seriously push back, the government becomes violent, using terror and imprisonment as its main weapons.

After the state murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti (with no consequences) and the violent gassing, beating, and detention of thousands of protestors, the demonstrations in Minneapolis began to thin out. Fewer and fewer people are willing to be exposed to poisonous gas, get their bones broken, be thrown into brutal detention, or even be outright killed. And who could blame them?

Make no mistake: this is the direction Trump and today’s Republican Party are taking America as quickly as they can. Already we have more people in concentration camps than Hitler did by 1939, and the oligarchs have been looting our country and crushing the middle class ever since Reagan invited them to take over in 1981.

• 45 years of massive tax cuts for the rich totaling over $35 trillion have been put on our nation’s credit card (our national debt) by Republicans, overwhelmingly benefiting corporations and making the ultra wealthy richer than any king or pharaoh in history.
• On Thursday, Trump gutted the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gasses because the fossil fuel industry crossed his palm with cash. He’s done the same with other environmental regulations, worker safety rules, and is handing billionaires control of our media left and right.
• Corrupt, oligarch-friendly judges groomed by billionaire-funded legal networks populate the Supreme Court and about half of our appeals courts, consistently siding with concentrated wealth and state power instead of the rights of ordinary citizens.
• To prevent the people from fighting back at the ballot box, Republican legislatures across the country have passed laws making it harder to vote, are purging voter rolls, restricted ballot access, and are redrawing districts to entrench GOP rule. There’s now Republican-sponsored legislation before Congress that would disenfranchise tens of millions of married women and low-income voters.
• With Trump following Putin’s playbook, we first saw family separations and detention camps that human rights observers say are actually concentration camps. Children were taken from their parents as a matter of policy, and entire communities were demonized by Trump, Vance, et al with racist rhetoric about “invasions,” “infestations,” and lies like, “They’re eating the dogs and cats!”

That kind of language isn’t accidental. It prepares a country to see some people as “others” not deserving of human rights, accept government-sponsored cruelty, and view a police state as a “protective force” (Hitler’s Schutzstaffel or SS is “protection force” in English). It normalizes and speeds the transition from oligarchy to outright dictatorship.

And they know all about the psychological tools they’re using to bring about this transition here in America. Throughout history, racism and misogyny have been the oligarch’s favorite tools. Divide working people by race, religion, and gender so they’ll never unite to challenge the oligarchs.

Even our foreign policy has been transformed from one that advocates and supports democracies around the world to supporting and lionizing authoritarian leaders while attacking our democratic allies. Trump undermined NATO, cozies up to brutal strongmen like Putin and Middle Eastern dictators, and treats global alliances and tariffs like protection rackets to push other countries to subsidize his family building another hotel or golf course.

And through it all, we see a steady erosion of trust in elections themselves, what Thomas Paine called the beating heart of democracy. Trump’s lickspittles and his billionaire-owned media outlets promote claims of “widespread voter fraud” with quite literally no credible evidence. And now they’re using that same bulls--t to try to rig this fall’s election.

So, what do we do? This year, forget about third parties or skipping election day, and vote for every Democrat on the ticket.

We all get it that the Democratic Party isn’t perfect. There are corporate sellouts in the Party like the so-called “New Democrats” and “Problem Solvers.” Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries seem to lack backbones. There are compromises that frustrate Americans who want real action and a restoration of the middle class.

But at least the Democratic Party is still operating inside the democratic tradition. It supports expanding voting rights, not restricting them. It backs labor organizing instead of union busting. It pushes to reduce the influence of dark money instead of unleashing more of it. It fights for clean air and to stop climate change. It appoints judges who respect precedent and civil rights rather than dismantling them.

When Democrats win, there’s space to fight for more democracy. When Republicans aligned with Trump win, the fight becomes about whether democracy survives at all in America.

In a two party system like ours, refusing to vote because one candidate or party isn’t pure enough usually doesn’t create a better option; it simply strengthens the faction that’s openly comfortable with authoritarian tactics and oligarchic economics.

If we want a country where working people have a real voice, where votes are counted and respected, where diversity is seen as strength instead of threat, we have to defend the imperfect democratic coalition we have. And that means voting for Democrats this fall, and supporting them now, almost without exception.

Of course, we want to demand better values, universal healthcare, bold climate action, serious campaign finance reform, free college, and real taxes on the morbidly rich. We have to organize, protest, and push our representatives with regular phone calls and other actions. That’s how democracy grows stronger.

But we also have to understand the stakes when we talk with friends and neighbors, support candidates, and step into the voting booth.

A vote for MAGA Republicans, or a failure to vote, is a statement in favor of the normalization of racism, the rigging of our voting system, and the continued consolidation of ever more wealth and power in the hands of billionaires. A vote for Democratic candidates, even weak ones, is a vote to keep the democratic experiment alive long enough to improve it.

This isn’t just another election cycle, it’s a crossroads: we must pick democracy or continue to embrace oligarchy fueled by Citizens United.

That’s the choice. History will remember which side we chose, and our children and grandchildren must live with the consequences.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.