The animating concept behind the Trump campaign will be chaos. This is what history shows us fascists do when given the chance to participate in democratic political campaigns: They create chaos. They do it because chaos works to their advantage. They revel in it, because they can see how profoundly chaos unnerves democratic-republicans—everyone, that is, whether liberal or conservative, who believes in the basic idea of a representative government that is built around neutral rules. Fascism exists to pulverize neutral rules.
So they campaign with explicit intention to instill a sense of chaos. And then comes the topper: They have the audacity to insist that the only solution to the chaos—that they themselves have either grossly exaggerated or in some cases created!—is to vote for them: “You see, there is nothing but chaos afoot, and only we can restore order!”
The real problem is no one votes. It’s the bare minimum level of effort. It’s the participation trophy. They can do all that because we put them there with embarrassingly bad voter turnout. We spend more time complaining than actually voting.
All of those problems are the symptoms of an unrepresentative government, and a government tends to represent the people who vote for them. If no one votes, they’ll listen to the highest bidder.