We can fight later. Now is the time to mourn.

When Donald Trump won for the first time, I spoke to a journalist friend in Turkey to express my condolences. I told her about all the protests planned and she gently tried to prepare me for disappointment. She and her friends protested against Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he was prime minister, she said. But over time the protests subsided and life in a country with dwindling freedoms took its course. This conversation stayed with me throughout the Trump presidency as a warning against being careless. When Trump was finally expelled from the White House, I felt patriotic pride in the endurance of the anti-Trump resistance, which had not for a moment accepted his authoritarian grotesqueness as our new normal.

It won’t be like that this time. Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident made possible by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency put everything they could into the fight, and they lost not only the Electoral College but most likely the popular vote as well. American voters, knowing exactly who Trump was, elected him. This, it turns out, is who we are.

Therefore, I expect the next few months to be a time of sadness rather than defiance. My own instinct – at odds with the demands of my job – is to retreat into my family, to seek solace in time with friends, in the theater and in novels, and to ignore the humiliating truth of what my country has become . This morning I returned to an essay from the 2019 New York Review of Books about the Russian term vnutrittaya emigratsia, or internal emigration, a conscious embrace of one’s own alienation. “For many Russian writers and artists, the idea of ​​turning inward and oblivious to current political concerns has been a vital skill and even an art form for centuries,” wrote Viv Groskop. I suspect that many of us will try to cultivate this ability, at least temporarily, in order to avoid going completely crazy.

But at some point the grief subsides or it slips into depression and despair. If this is the case, the resistance that arises against the new MAGA will be different from what existed before. The hope of ridding the country of Trumpism and making it an aberration will be gone. What remains is the more modest effort to alleviate the suffering his government will bring upon us. There is no point in protesting his inauguration, as millions did in 2017. But we will hopefully take to the streets when his troops come into our neighborhoods to remove migrant families. We need to strengthen the networks that help women in red states get abortions, especially if Trump’s Justice Department cracks down on shipping abortion pills or his FDA revokes approval for them. In state and local elections, I want to know how candidates promise to protect us from the MAGA movement’s threats, to transform our public health system and our schools.

In the longer term, we need a liberal policy that is about more than just defending against the right. After all, Trump is a particularly terrible manifestation of historical forces that are reshaping politics across the Western world, elevating nationalist leaders like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and spurring the growth of parties like the right-wing Alternative for the National Rally Germany and France . One can accuse Kamala Harris of spending too much time courting moderate Republican women, or that her “opportunity economics” rhetoric is vague. But few politicians have figured out how to hold together a coalition that includes both wealthy, educated, cosmopolitan elites and working-class voters who value tradition and social stability. Perhaps this is no longer possible, but what is needed is at least a plausible idea of ​​what a thriving, progressive society looks like.

Ultimately, Trump’s only redeeming feature is his incompetence. If history is any guide, many of those he brings into government will despise him. It will not give people the economic relief they crave. If he implements his plans for universal tariffs, economists expect higher inflation. Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, who dreams of imposing aggressive austerity measures on the federal government, said Americans will have to endure “some temporary hardship.” With COVID, we saw Trump handle a major crisis, and there is not the slightest reason to believe he will do better at handling another crisis. I have little doubt that many of those who voted for him will regret it. In the end, he might even discredit bombastic right-wing nationalism, just as George W. Bush—whose re-election also broke my heart—discredited neoconservatism.

The question of if and when that happens is how much of our system will still exist and whether Trump’s opponents have created an alternative that can restore people to a sense of dignity and optimism. That will be the task of the next four years: to save what we can and imagine a bearable future. For now, however, all I can do is mourn.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.