Allegheny County 2016 primary winners: Clinton, Trump 2012: Obama 57%, Romney 42% Population: 1,230,459 (2015 est.) Latest voter registration totals:Democrats: 521,881Republicans: 248,934Unaffiliated: 66,775Other: 45,567 Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County, the second-most populous county in the state after Philadelphia, is heavily Democratic. But it’s also home to the largest concentration of registered Republicans in the state. Clinton is counting on running up big numbers in the city of Pittsburgh to offset any gains Trump may make in the suburbs, and in the more conservative surrounding southwestern Pennsylvania counties, including Westmoreland County.

Heading into the convention, Sanders has 1,894 delegates to Clinton’s 2,807 when including superdelegates, or party officials who can support the candidate of their choice. It takes 2,383 to win, a threshold Clinton crossed in early June to become the presumptive nominee.

Clinton crossed in early June to become the presumptive nominee.

I am joined by a trans woman about my age. People get afraid, she tells me, and nobody wants to feel afraid. But if you get angry, you feel empowered. Trump is playing on people’s fears, to get them angry, which in turn makes us, on the other side, feel fearful. It’s a domino effect.

The night was sad. The center failed to hold. Did I blame the rioting kids? I did. Did I blame Trump? I did. This, Mr. Trump, I thought, is why we practice civility. This is why, before we say exactly what is on our minds, we run it past ourselves, to see if it makes sense, is true, is fair, has a flavor of kindness, and won’t hurt someone or make someone’s difficult life more difficult. Because there are, among us, in every political camp, limited, angry, violent, and/or damaged people, waiting for any excuse to throw off the tethers of restraint and get after it. After which it falls to the rest of us, right and left, to clean up the mess.

Trump seems to awaken something in them that they feel they have, until now, needed to suppress. What is that thing? It is not just (as I’m getting a bit tired of hearing) that they’ve been left behind economically. (Many haven’t, and au contraire.) They’ve been left behind in other ways, too, or feel that they have. To them, this is attributable to a country that has moved away from them, has been taken away from them—by Obama, the Clintons, the “lamestream” media, the “élites,” the business-as-usual politicians. They are stricken by a sense that things are not as they should be and that, finally, someone sees it their way. They have a case of Grievance Mind, and Trump is their head kvetcher.

As an academic, I study social media and social movements, from the uprising in Egypt to Black Lives Matter

MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.

Republican candidates had sent certain messages to voters for years, and now the party hears them coming back from Mr. Trump translated, or perhaps decoded.

Texan with a Princeton class ring

Sanders is giving these views a voice. When Bernie asserts on national television that it is Wall Street that regulates Congress instead of the other way around, he strikes a chord that potentially enables people to resonate together — Republicans and Democrats alike. Second, Sanders defies the political class by projecting a vision of how our country could move toward justice.

My finding is the result of a national poll I conducted in the last five days of December under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, sampling 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum. Running a standard statistical analysis, I found that education, income, gender, age, ideology and religiosity had no significant bearing on a Republican voter’s preferred candidate. Only two of the variables I looked at were statistically significant: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism, though the former was far more significant than the latter.

But my favorite part was the “get ahead” part of this answer. Because, to me, it demonstrates how Clinton — as a Presidential candidate — thinks about public education in America. Education is a scarce resource that helps some poor kids individually “get ahead,” but only if they demonstrate talent and ambition. Educating the poor is not a thing Clinton believes benefits the nation, it’s just a thing that individual kids can do to enrich themselves.

In this context, it made sense for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to suspend the Sanders campaign’s access to the data until it could determine the extent of the damage, and the degree to which the Clinton campaign’s private data had been compromised. As it turns out the ethical breach by Sanders operatives was massive, but the actual data discovery was limited.

Today, DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz issued the following statement:   “The Sanders campaign has now complied with the DNC’s request to provide the information that we have requested of them. Based on this information, we are restoring the Sanders campaign’s access to the voter file, but will continue to investigate to ensure that the data that was inappropriately accessed has been deleted and is no longer in possession of the Sanders campaign. The Sanders campaign has agreed to fully cooperate with the continuing DNC investigation of this breach. The fact that data was accessed inappropriately is completely unacceptable, and the DNC expects each campaign to operate with integrity going forward with respect to the voter file.

Thirdly, rather incredibly, the leadership of the DNC has used this incident to shut down our ability to access our own information, information which is the lifeblood of any campaign. This is the information about our supporters, our volunteers, the lists of people we intend to contact in Iowa, New Hampshire and elsewhere. This is information that we have worked hard to obtain. It is our information, not the DNCs.

And there really is no other good word for Trump’s rhetoric, and the behavior of many of his followers, than “fascistic.” So it’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism would be mistaken for fascism – they are, after all, not just kissing cousins, but more akin to siblings. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist.

The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. It might, in fact, more accurately be called "sucker populism."

Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the psychology of celebrity-worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they too can someday become rich and famous -- because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It's all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who were never any good at math to begin with, and more than eager to delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot.

It is by small steps of incremental meanness and viciousness that we lose our humanity. The Nazis, in the end, embodied the ascension of utter demonic inhumanity, but they didn't get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies.

What Trump is doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, is making the large and growing body of proto-fascists in America larger and even more vicious – that is, he is creating the conditions that could easily lead to a genuine and potentially irrevocable outbreak of fascism.

To be very, very clear: Donald Trump is a bigot. He is a racist. He is an Islamophobe and a xenophobe. He profits off the hatred and stigmatization of traditionally oppressed groups in American society. That makes him, and his European peers, and racists in other eras in American history, a threat to crucial values of equality and fair treatment, and a threat to the actual human beings he's targeting and demonizing.

So if Donald Trump isn't a fascist, what is he? Well, he's a right-wing populist. And while fascists are rare in 2015, right-wing populists are not. In fact, it's kind of weird that America hasn't had a real one before now. The UK has the UK Independence Party (UKIP); France has Marine Le Pen and the Front National; Germany has Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the anti-Muslim Pegida movement; Sweden has the Sweden Democrats; the Netherlands has the Party for Freedom and its leader, Geert Wilders.

Of course, many fringe fascists themselves like Donald Trump and view him as the best they're going to get on a national scale. They argue he's sparking a big spike in activity around and interest in white nationalism. "Demoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that," Stormfront founder Don Black told Politico recently. But that does not make Trump himself a fascist.

Griffin, who is a professor of history and political theory at Oxford Brookes University, puts it best: "You can be a total xenophobic racist male chauvinist bastard and still not be a fascist."

To be blunt: Donald Trump is not a fascist. "Fascism" has been an all-purpose insult for many years now, but it has a real definition, and according to scholars of historical fascism, Trump doesn't qualify. Rather, he's a right-wing populist, or perhaps an "apartheid liberal" in the words of Roger Griffin, author of The Nature of Fascism.

Trump's embrace of racism, anti-Mexican immigrant bigotry and Islamophobia is largely opportunistic. My only hesitation in calling it cynical is that I think Trump may be the type who, once he finds something convenient to say, then starts to believe it.

To Muslim Americans: What you’re hearing from Trump and other Republicans is absolutely, unequivocally wrong. It’s inconsistent with our values as a nation — a nation which you are helping to build. This is your country too. I’m proud to be your fellow American. And many, many other Americans feel the same way.