Win or lose, Donald Trump was the nominee of one of the major parties, and he polled close to Hillary Clinton till the end. Only to some extent can he be dismissed as anomalous.

Which has me very worried. You see, I lived for over four years in South America under a technically elected but nonetheless authoritarian leader. Right-wing, left-wing, or nothing-wing, Latin American leaders tend to have more in common than not. I see it in Trump, and I’m not alone.

“Don’t put your faith in society. Put your faith in me. I’m a strong leader, and I’m going to make things better all by myself.” So Sen. Marco Rubio characterized Trump during a TV interview before Trump’s nomination. Rubio, whose in-laws are from the same country I lived in, Colombia, added, “This is very typical in the Third World. You see it a lot in Latin America—for decades. Basically the argument he’s making is that he, single-handedly, is going to turn the country around. We’ve never been that kind of country.”

My last two years in Colombia were close to the Venezuelan border, and I got firsthand refugee accounts of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro. The last “Colombian” woman I dated proved to be Venezuelan. She was as disgusted as I was with the mores and self-imposed ignorance of Colombians generally, but nonetheless found it preferable to her homeland barring governmental change. Today Venezuela is even worse, with food and electricity shortages and hyperinflation such that dinner in a restaurant costs a brick-sized stack of the highest-denomination bank notes.

I visited Argentina twice under the waning days of Cristina Kirchner’s presidency to find many of the trains had stopped running, the police had stopped policing, and nobody was accepting credit cards because credit-card companies were being clobbered by the inflation between when purchases took place and when payment was due. Argentinians always admitted to me it was their own fault, that the people had voted for her. But there as throughout most of Latin America, even in free elections voters tend to like strongmen. Or strongwomen.

A March article in the online publication Vox, “The Rise of American Authoritarianism,” makes a compelling case that Donald Trump’s strongman persona may explain both why his “despisal rating” is so high and why so many other Americans fervently support him. “Trump embodies the classic leadership style,” said the Vox article. “Simple, powerful, and punitive.”

According to the article:

Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians’ fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics—and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.

It added, “A candidate Like Donald Trump.”

Tough guys—real tough guys, not men who consider promiscuity without a condom their “personal Vietnam”—can get some things done in places where nobody else previously could. Chile is now Latin America’s most advanced country, edging toward first-world status. It has great freeways; its capital, Santiago, has a subway system better than all but a few of those in the U.S.; its buildings are a combination of beautiful steel and glass, and many are clearly styled after Germany’s most beautiful large city, Munich. Business there is remarkably efficient. And all because one strongman, Augusto Pinochet, staged an anti-Marxist coup and brought in University of Chicago economists to build a new economy.

But that coup was bloody, and he subsequently killed thousands and imprisoned and tortured vastly more before finally allowing free elections and handing Chile back to the people.

Likewise, the previous president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, made serious progress against the FARC guerrillas-turned-narcotraffickers who have plagued the country for over half a century. He also struck hard at the drug lords and dramatically lowered the country’s homicide rate. But Uribe was beset by a series of corruption and human-rights-abuse scandals—although in no way comparable to Pinochet’s.

So even when you get a strongman with positive accomplishments, to make that omelet they have to break a few eggs. Which brings us back to Trump.

Time and again what Trump promises to do is blatantly unconstitutional or just plain nonsense, such as his assertion that Mexico will pay for the wall he claims he’ll build along the southern border. Or that he’ll kill not just terrorists but their families too. (I’m a veteran and stay close to the military, and I can say with certainty they will not obey a commander-in-chief who orders face-to-face intentional killing of civilians.)

Yet Trump’s biggest offense could merely be the normalization of that which so recently was utterly unthinkable: he’s paving the way for a strongman strong enough to overcome those vital constitutional checks and balances. “Donald Trump could just be the first of many Trumps in American politics,” says Vox. Even before Trump’s candidacy, political discourse in the U.S. had become more radicalized than at any point since just before the Civil War.

“All the rules that once governed our discourse have been blown away, and we’re headed in a very dangerous direction,” said Rubio in that interview. “We’re going to lose our republic.”

Michael Fumento, an attorney, author, and journalist who lived over four years in Colombia and four months in Mexico.