Something odd has happened. A “fascist” has risen to power in the world’s oldest democracy. A fascist is, in fact, what Kamala Harris called Donald Trump just weeks ago. In those tense days before the election, a host of Trump critics and opponents used similarly alarmist language, such as Rep. Dan Goldman (D-New York) suggesting that Trump “is paving the way to become … an Adolf Hitler.”

None of this rhetoric was new. In a major 2022 address, ahead of the midterm elections, President Joe Biden warned Americans that democracy itself was “on the ballot.” The question in front of voters, he declared, was whether “democracy will long endure.”

Today, a verdict has been handed down, yet the language of autocratic doom has dissipated, a faint memory of a different era. Biden welcomed the would-be dictator to the White House and seemed in good spirits, pledging to do everything he could to make sure the president-elect was accommodated.

In Harris’s concession speech, she did not seem overly troubled by the prospect — for the first time in U.S. history — of a fascist in the most powerful office in the land. Instead, she offered a succession of motivational platitudes. “To the young people who are watching,” she intoned, “it is okay to feel sad and disappointed. But please know it’s going to be okay.”

If this is what the fight against fascism looks like, it’s not much of a fight. It sounds more like a dishonorable surrender. The shift away from “existential” rhetoric is welcome: The challenge of democracy, as I have written, is one of coming to terms with frightening electoral outcomes. This sudden softening, however, raises questions about whether Democrats ever truly believed their own words — or whether they were engaging in a cynical effort to motivate and even shame Americans into voting against Trump in the absence of compelling reasons to vote for their candidate. But it’s not just politicians who embraced hyperbole.

It’s the hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who, last time around, in 2016, quickly fashioned themselves into the “resistance” — a moniker that “unless you are burying weapons in the forests of Poland or hiding in the basements of French country houses, one has no right to assume,” as the author James Kirchick archly put it.

This time around, they appear strangely subdued, victims of the dual reality of what Sam Adler-Bell terms “pre-exhaustion” and “non-novelty.” In 2016, Trump’s win could be explained away as a fluke of the electoral college, an aberration in time’s march of progress. To resist was to pave the way for a restoration, a restoration that came with Biden’s endearingly boring bid for normalcy.

Now, though, for many Harris supporters, there is a sense of being humbled, even mugged, by reality.

We thought this was our country, but we discovered that much of the country had left us behind, indifferent to our warnings. Just enough Hispanics, Black men and Arab Americans apparently decided that (supposed) white supremacy was an acceptable price to pay to bring down a system that promised much but delivered little.

Perhaps, too, there is a bit of shame, that most paralyzing of emotions. In his bracing postmortem, Adler-Bell wrote: “One feels shame for having missed something, misapprehending political reality. … One feels shame for risking too much hope, for encouraging others to do the same. And most of all, one feels shame — humiliation, even — over feeling powerless: powerless to stop bad things from happening to people we love but also simply less powerful, ousted from the driver’s seat of history.”

Emotions of despair are different from those of hope. Hope spurs action. Despair more often leads to retreat.

In this vein, a growing number of former activists are proposing rest and self-care as better, saner propositions than political action. As activist David Hogg, who survived the Parkland school shooting in Florida, reflected: “We’ve marched so much. We’re tired of doing the same thing over and over.”

There is also a sense that protests might not exactly work, that people power isn’t particularly powerful.

As the political scientist Erica Chenoweth noted in a 2022 article, nonviolent campaigns are “seeing their lowest success rates in more than a century.”

The reasons vary depending on whether the countries in question are democracies or dictatorships. In the United States, heightened polarization means that leaders perceive politics in zero-sum terms and more readily ignore the demands of members of the opposing party. But even sympathetic elected officials — as with the 2020 George Floyd protests — tend to respond with cosmetic reforms and symbolic statements of solidarity that don’t actually have much measurable impact, as the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has documented.

Perhaps some of this demobilization is for the best. Four more years of civil unrest would probably have little effect on someone like Trump and might even trigger him to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests, as he has already threatened to do.

It might be tantalizing to see ourselves as radicals and revolutionaries against the tide of dictatorship. But it’s presumptuous and even self-indulgent to make ourselves the center of the story. We are not revolutionaries. America, for all its flaws, is still a democracy.

And in democracies, there probably shouldn’t be revolutionaries. There are citizens. And that should be enough.

Luckily, the alternative to protest is as obvious as it is urgent. We should allow Trump’s victory to chasten us, to force us to reflect on why so many of our fellow Americans cast their lot with Trump despite being well aware of his flaws.

And then we must focus not on inchoate expressions of rage but on persuading voters to vote differently next time around. That’s the more difficult work, since there will be no immediate gratification to be found.

But it is also perfectly legitimate for individuals to make other, more personal calculations. As Cheri Hall, a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant who is Black, told her social media followers, now might be the time to take a “great Black step back.” This is also a time to remember that living a good life is not the same as having the right politics. If our time on Earth is finite — we have only about 4,000 weeks to live on average — then we must choose carefully how to spend it.

Despite how it might feel in this moment, there is no shame in defeat, and there should be no embarrassment in pulling back, even if temporarily. Life is too short, but it is also long.

Shadi Hamid is a Washington Post columnist.