American democracy has demonstrated—barely—that it’s possible to oust a fascist leader. But it’s harder to oust a fascist populace when fascism lives on in the hearts of too many people.

A Newsweek poll found that 45 percent of Republican voters supported the storming of the Capitol, and 68 percent said they were no threat to democracy. Large majorities of Republicans still accept Trump’s lies that the election was stolen.

That’s why the glee at the fracturing of the Republican elite is premature. Republican elected officials cross Trump voters at their peril. That will persist whether Trump survives as a politician or the movement is led by a shrewder, less demented authoritarian like Sen. Josh Hawley.

At rare moments that show the right’s true face, the Republican elite distances itself from flagrant excess. However Trumpism, with or without Trump personally, remains depressingly popular. The naked violence at the Capitol was merely the extreme edge of a steady slide to authoritarianism that has been embraced all too willingly by most Republican leaders—and voters.

The great German ironist Berthold Brecht, a leftist who chose to live in communist East Germany, could not abide the stupid tyranny of the regime. In a famous poem, written in 1953 after bureaucratic complaints of popular resistance to the official program, he wrote that perhaps the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one.

In a doubly ironic variant on Brecht, this is the challenge that now faces Americans. Trump will be gone, but fascist popular sentiments live on. And there is no 25th Amendment for replacing the people.

What there is, however, is a long-term effort whose seeds were planted in Georgia and Arizona. In those states, a ten-year organizing campaign not only roused Americans of color. It began the process of winning back decent white people. Both efforts were Black- and Latino-led, but were increasingly broad coalitions.

Dispatching Trump is only the beginning of a long road to what America was supposed to be, and must be, and never quite was.