One thing the Muslim Brotherhood member I spoke to never had to worry about was boredom. Liberal democracies, meanwhile, are supposed to offer precisely that: the luxury of being bored by politics. Experts—or at least somewhat reasonable politicians—could be entrusted with day-to-day governing. The world wouldn’t fall apart (or end) while you took a short nap. The government, for the most part, wouldn’t intrude on your personal life. In this age of relative boredom, you would be free to pursue pleasure and contentment.

To have an authoritarian personality as your president is to live a different kind of life. As Andrew Sullivan writes, the dictator “begins to permeate your psyche and soul; he dominates every news cycle and issues pronouncements—each one shocking and destabilizing—round the clock. He delights in constantly provoking and surprising you, so that his monstrous ego can be perennially fed.” This applies to Dear Leaders, but it also applies to people like Trump. This sounds unappealing, but, on an either conscious or subconscious level, many Americans, even vociferous Trump opponents, seem to like it. Whether it’s Washington residents going to bars at 10 o’clock in the morning to watch former FBI director James Comey testify to Congress, or the somewhat unlikely phenomenon of “Comey yoga” in Los Angeles, this was politics at its most combustible and exciting. And in a time of unprecedented polarization, the political became personal. It became part of who you were.