The clear frontrunner of the Republican Party for president is a man who was impeached and is due in court for participating in an attempted overthrow of the government. Some have called Donald Trump a cult leader. I think he’s a drug.

Cards on the table, I am a recovering addict who will be six years clean next month. If you want to truly experience unfiltered human nature, I highly recommend going to rehab. That’s when you see people with an awful lot of modernity scraped off.

Lesson one from rehab: progress is hard. Dealing with trauma through therapy is expensive and can take years before you really see any effect. Add in mental illnesses that require pharmacological intervention and you’re talking months at least of slow, often costly, experimentation to find the thing that brings you up to socially acceptable. Not good. I know very few people who find joy in their medication. It just lets them reach the baseline sucky existence of the rest of the world.

Self-medication, though? That shit is immediate. You down a bunch of shots or do a line of coke, there is absolutely zero question of whether this is altering your state of being. Even aside from the specific chemical changes from your drug of choice, there is a comfort in knowing that something is definitely different. You have altered the circumstances that you are currently in. That’s why it’s called an escape.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to call the last two decades an endless parade of trauma. It started with 9/11, and has run the gamut from war to plague to financial collapse to increased natural disasters. For a pretty huge chunk of the population, the election of the first Black president and the progress of LGBT rights was traumatizing. Just because they’re bigots doesn’t mean they don’t experience mental and emotional pain, bullshit though it may be.

Since society as a mass can’t shoot heroin, authoritarianism serves as a kind of collective drug. Experts still debate whether Trump is technically a fascist, but there's little argument he is an authoritarian. For many supporters, that's a feature, not a bug.

Whatever else you can say about Trump, he was immediate. He banned travel from Muslim countries, barred trans people from the military, separated child border crossers from their families, and constantly, Constantly, CONSTANTLY picked fights with whoever he liked. There was never any doubt that Trump was doing something. This was not the status quo. This was change, inarguable and in your face. Trump was the electoral equivalent of getting fucked up and fighting a cop.

This sentiment isn’t limited to the right, either. Since his election, Joe Biden has worked quietly and within the rules. He doesn’t pick fights, he doesn’t make grand statements he can’t back up, and his policies are not designed to hurt people just because. In short, Biden is therapy and medication and the slow, painful path toward a steadier future.

And some people on the left absolutely hate that. They want an elected king, someone who will be Trump but for universal healthcare and eliminating student loan debts. When Biden doesn’t do that (because progress is so much harder than oppression), they act exactly like junkies denied a fix they feel they've earned.

Real change and progress is slow, and when you’re in the middle of it, it feels like it isn’t moving at all. That’s why so many addicts say, “one day at a time.” Point out that Biden is doing things like fighting climate change, pushing for racial equality, and protecting abortion access, and you often get frustrated exclamations that it’s not enough. And of course, it isn’t, but it’s also something.

Scared and tired people want change, even if the change is bad. It’s what drives addicts to abandon healthy practices for a fix, and it’s what makes previous democratically minded folks thirsty for a dictator. Authoritarianism is a high, and Americans are seeking it because they are so terribly low. They have been all my adult life.