Jean Lewandowski is a retired special needs teacher. She lives in Nashua.

It’s astonishing that millions of Americans are starry-eyed about ceding power to a self-styled strongman who’s already demonstrated he’ll go to any length to keep it. Yes, democracy is often disappointing, difficult, noisy, frustrating, and prone to corrupting influences, but as long as it survives, it’s also ours to fix. It’s a fantasy to imagine some champion will free us from those responsibilities and always be on our side, no matter what.

The evidence of this fiction is all around us, here and abroad. There’s near-unanimous agreement among Americans that our immigration system is broken. Former President Trump’s puppets in Congress danced to his tune for months in negotiating a hard-line immigration bill that was the quid pro quo for approving aid to Ukraine and Israel. Then, because President Biden might benefit politically, Trump commanded his people to reject the bipartisan bill. Every one of them dove under a bus for him. In the end, what Americans want and need was irrelevant because it didn’t serve his needs. There is no safety under the wing of a predator.

What’s happened to the Republican Party is a microcosm of the kinds of failed states asylum seekers want to escape. In our own hemisphere, right-wing populist Nicolas Maduro seized power in Venezuela in 2015 by hook and crook. Since then, Venezuela dropped 42 places in the Press Freedom Index; most media are state-controlled. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch estimate that under Maduro’s administration, more than 20,000 people have been subject to extrajudicial killings, and seven million have fled the country. The UN Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela concluded that its justice system and the right to due process have been disastrously eroded, including allowing evidence gained through torture.

These are important facts, but to truly understand what life is like for everyday people living under authoritarianism, we need to hear their stories. We are deeply grateful to have Russian friends who have allowed me to share their experiences. Last week they wrote, “About this terrible war. I’ve been depressed for two years and can’t get my mind off the terrible news. My country has gone crazy. Only in the family I am sure that we equally hate the war and the mad Fuhrer who started it. I am horrified that around me old friends and colleagues, decent educated people, have suddenly turned into patriotic idiots and obscurantists, bewitched by propaganda.”

“For many years we were taught to hate fascism, and now my country itself has become fascist. The old sad joke about the fact that ‘fascism will not pass, but the passage can be widened’ has been realized…It is impossible to fight this. We are stupidly waiting for when and how this ‘shame and horror without end’ will end. This is our life. Once upon a time people lived in Berlin in 1942. We too survive in Russia 2024….We cannot speak out openly to oppose the thieves and murderers who have seized power in our country and are destroying it, we remain silent. But we do not participate in murder and theft. This is how we raised our children. Explicitly or implicitly, my students see and understand this behavior, at least those with brains.”

Two of their children have had to leave the country with their families, so they’re separated from their grandchildren. There are travel restrictions. They have to watch what they say and to whom. This is not freedom.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia tried to create a system of popular rule, but the structures of autocracy had been in place for centuries. The entrenched corruption and ruthlessness that sustains totalitarian rule doesn’t just dissipate when the people demand freedom. The oligarchs teamed up with the KGB to undermine reforms and “eliminate” those who supported democracy. After a decade of disruptions and hardships, the old power structure blamed democracy and managed to convince those who were suffering that their lives would be so much better if they just gave up and handed it all to Putin. (Masha Gessen, “Putin’s People.”)

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America doesn’t need some violence-prone, grandiose, self-serving “hero.” We have inherited everything we need: a 250-year history of commitment to democracy; a declaration of the right of all humans to live in dignity; legal and Constitutional structures created and refined to define our responsibilities and guarantee our freedoms. We also have the examples of those who devoted their lives and sacrificed everything to make the union “more perfect:” the abolitionists, service members, civil servants, teachers, writers, union organizers, journalists, and advocates and activists for equal opportunity and justice for all.

And we have our friends and neighbors: those who serve conscientiously at the State House, on a school board, or a town board; who talk to elected representatives or testify at public meetings; who volunteer at the polls or cast a ballot. This is how it’s done. Benjamin Franklin commented after the ratification of the Constitution, “We have a republic, if we can keep it.” He was talking to us.