Your vote for President isn't radical

Image description: an oil rig in North Dakota stands in stark contrast to the snowy ground and light gray sky

In the US presidential election I wish we could be real and talk about strategic voting, the problems with Jill Stein & the US Green Party, and the problems with Hillary Clinton which have nothing to do with her illegal insecure private email server.

Clinton isn’t unappealing because she’s “unlikable”. She’s unacceptable because she’s made a career out of conservative values which actively cause harm to the most marginalized in our country and the world. She’s a warmongering imperialist who voted for the invasion of Iraq, supports the continued drone-bombing of civilians in Yemen, supports the neocolonial Israeli state, and she’s overseen anti-democratic coups in Honduras and Nicaragua. She backed anti-black “war on drugs” legislation and actively tried to silence the Black Lives Matter movement. She is personally invested in private prisons and massive oil companies. These are serious concerns, not something to dismiss as a fair compromise for ideological purity, and that’s not saying anything about her inaction on vital issues like First Nations rights and reparations, ending mass surveillance, and housing as a human right. She’s not just a neoliberal Democrat who’s “not radical enough”; her entire career is built on imperialism abroad and neocolonialism at home.

The rhetoric that 3rd party voters and abstainers are stupid or too privileged to be affected by a Trump presidency is patronizing and false. Some people won’t vote for Clinton because they were betrayed by the DNC during the unfair primaries; some won’t vote for her because they’re misogynists. But some of us have been watching people vote for “the lesser of two evils” for decades and seen that it only entrenches the two-party system and doesn’t make a damned difference anyway.

A few things are very clear: The GOP is eating itself, which is great; the DNC is gradually ceding ground to the radical Left, which is also great; and Presidential elections are not the main site of struggle in liberation, or any meaningful change.