The relationship between liberty and extremism in the GOP has changed. Where in 1964 Barry Goldwater stunned his party’s convention by declaring that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” the leading Republicans of today train their radicalism on the suppression of freedom itself. Optimists insist that this authoritarianism will ebb when Donald Trump exits the political scene, whenever that relief comes to pass. But the fact is that Republican Party politics has taken a thoroughly autocratic turn, and the future that they’ll bring to America depends only upon whether Trump himself wrests back the White House.

The Republican Party has been evolving in an authoritarian direction for decades. The GOP, led by North Carolinians, prosecuted a relentless campaign of democratic erosion throughout the Tea-Party and early-MAGA eras by suppressing the vote, taking powers away from Democratic governors, manipulating the judiciary, and gerrymandering legislative districts to guarantee quasi-permanent Republican majorities in red states.

The future of the GOP, then, is likely to be autocratic. In the event Trump triumphs wins next year’s presidential election, America will likely see the U.S. government employed in an effort to harass and silence media outlets critical of the administration. Bogus prosecutions of political opponents, including Joe Biden, are very likely. Trump will inspire the most violent elements of American society (the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers) to inflict physical intimidation upon political opponents. We’ll see a harrowing and perhaps final decline in the 250-year democratic experiment.

Trump recognizes no limits on his ability to satisfy his own narcissism and his violent lust for control over the levers of American statecraft. He has been indicted for upwards of 40 felonies and he incited a mob of fascists to assault the U.S. Capitol building. He instructed the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” a gesture of encouragement that they acted upon on January 6. As Michelle Goldberg evocatively put it, “we are staring into the eye of the storm of American democratic collapse.” Democracy in America has never been assured of success; that’s why we call our national journey the “American experiment,” and this experiment could end in failure.

But this horror is not foreordained. What could happen, instead, is a repudiation of Trump at the ballot box that secures democracy at the federal level for at least another four years (I am not convinced the old man will retire after a defeat; a 2028 run seems entirely plausible). At any rate, Trump’s potential electoral rejection would have different ramifications for the Republican Party. They would have nominated Donald Trump for president three times in a row. They would be disgraced and discredited. But what also would happen is that the smattering of pro-democracy voters who have held on despite everything would likely depart from the GOP, and only militant MAGA-heads would remain to set the course of the party.

In this case, the Republican Party would spiral further into the netherworld of fascist extremism. The coming parade of Republican presidential nominees would reflect the MAGA lineage of the Trump era. And because America is not, for all its flaws, a fascist country, the GOP would find it harder to win national elections except when serendipitous outliers occurred. Its resentments would smolder but it would be largely impotent. When those sporadic exceptional years bubbled up, however, the country would have face the same existential challenge that it currently confronts with Donald Trump threatening to snuff out liberty’s light.

I am no futurist. Scientists state that no one can see the future because it hasn’t happened yet, and this fact precludes any political prediction from having the heft of certainty. But we can make fair estimations based upon what has happened since Donald Trump came to dominate American politics, and indeed from the trend lines the Republican Party has followed since the days of Goldwater’s ravings in the San Francisco Cow Palace. The country faces a long-term battle with authoritarianism and right-wing zeal. Will it be President Trump, or President Marjorie Taylor Greene?