An essay was published here a few days ago titled "Why I am Voting For Hillary." While I respect the author for posting it here--"behind enemy lines," so to speak--I still felt that his reasoning was just the latest update of the same reasoning we hear every four years, which goes: You have to vote for the Democratic nominee because the Republicans are awful.

I concur: they are awful. And they'll likely always be awful. Yet some people are always trying to use this inescapable part of American political reality to justify all manner of backsliding by the other political party--you know, the one that claims to represent "the people."

So I would like to write a rebuttal here. Not of that article, but of that entire manner of thinking.

Let's start with Donald Trump. Yes, he's awful. He finds new ways to be awful. He's flamboyantly, crudely, cartoonishly awful. He's a racist and a sexist, and he's flatly unqualified to hold the presidency. What would he do as president? Harass people on Twitter at 3 AM? This provides the pro-mainstream argument with its greatest strength: naturally, we should do whatever it takes to keep someone like that out of power, right?

Yet due to the unique nature of the 2016 election, it also serves as that argument's Achilles heel. Why? Because this year, we're electing someone for one term only. That's right, whoever wins the White House in 2016 will not be there past 2020. Hillary Clinton won't be because there is no way in hell that someone as unpopular as she is--and with the public as dissatisfied with the economy as they are--will give the Democrats 16 years. 16 years never even happens in good times, with popular presidents. Donald Trump, on the other hand, will be a one-term president because he's Donald Trump.

So while in heated elections the focus always turns to winning, and winning now, I think we may benefit this time from thinking a few moves ahead.

Which brings me to Hillary Clinton. Many of us dislike her and don't trust her, and I think we have good reason. The one thing she's been consistent about throughout her career is a willingness to say anything to get elected. So while feeling the electoral heat, she's willing to parrot her erstwhile rival Bernie Sanders and offer her own free tuition plan, she then goes behind closed doors and tells her elite donors that free college tuition is a nutty idea only popular with political naifs who are "living in their parents' basement." And while her surrogates are out and about telling everyone that Hillary Clinton is running on "the most progressive agenda in history," Clinton herself, behind closed doors and to that same group of donors, says that she prefers to occupy the space "from the center-left to the center-right" on the political spectrum. Hillary Clinton may say that she wants to reverse police militarization, but her actions on the subject likely speak louder than her words. Because that's just the kind of person she is. Deep down, Hillary Clinton is a politician who is most comfortable in closed rooms in the company of the very rich and very powerful, and who thinks voters are something to be "managed."

Which is why she is the absolute worst person the Democrats could have put up in the populist, anti-establishment mood of 2016.

So let's do a thought experiment. Let's imagine the one term of both a Clinton and a Trump presidency, and let's imagine where we'll be both two years into them, and in 2020, when they'll be over. To do this I'd go so far as to say we need no crystal ball whatsoever, and that all we need to do is look at the behavior of voters over the past couple of decades and extrapolate from there.

First, a Clinton presidency. We're two years into it, and needless to say, Hillary has not been a transformational president. Her administration is (probably correctly) seen as corrupt and in the back pocket of Wall Street. The wars continue with no end in sight. The economy is either still sputtering, or has slid into another recession. Will Hillary's natural rightward bent help her stave off a slaughter in the midterms? Absolutely not, because it doesn't work like that. She still has a D next to her name, she's still seen as a liberal in the sense that "liberal" has come to mean "useless elite," and the R's by that time will have been out of the White House for ten years. They'll be foaming at the mouth. They'll want blood, they'll smell blood, and they'll get it. Because can you even imagine the existential despair that will have settled over the vast majority of left-leaning voters two years into another Clinton presidency? Yeah, it'll be ugly. And needless to say, the GOP will emerge victorious in the 2018 midterms, possibly with a supermajority. I probably don't even have to mention that Clinton's response to this shellacking will be to move even further to the right, or that doing so won't help her keep her job. In 2020, the Republicans won't make the same mistake twice, instead putting up someone more "presentable" like Paul Ryan or Scott Walker. The media will have a collective orgasm, crowing about how this represents a "return to sanity" on the part of the GOP, except here's the thing about those guys: they are very, very, very far to the right. They're the movement conservatives, the true believers. And they'll clean Hillary's clock. And so now we're looking at a President Scott Walker, possibly with a supermajority in Congress. (And that's not even getting into how if Democratic turnout is weak in both 2018 and 2020, Republicans will win at the state level, so they'll be the ones to control the redistricting that follows the census. A Clinton presidency could directly result in the Democrats being gerrymandered out of existence.)

Obviously, that was a very ugly scenario, but what about a Trump presidency? What would happen then? Here is where my "behavioral model" of prediction fails, because like anyone else, I have absolutely no idea what a Trump presidency would actually be like. (Though I will not lapse into the Godwin's-Law-busting hyperbole that has come to pass for "analysis" in leftish circles.) The only thing I can say for sure about a Trump administration is that it would be a total disaster. Would he stage gladiator duels on the National Mall? Would he rent out the Lincoln Bedroom to "hot babes?" Would he pull a Palin and quit halfway through? (I can see the press conference now: "Yes, I answered the call and became president, not that my resume needed it. But I found the work to be frankly beneath me and not very profitable. However, being an ex-president, now that's where the real money is. Right, Bill?") But if we assume that the Donald and his itchy Twitter finger make it through four whole years, I think we can also assume roughly the opposite behavior from voters: this time it will be conservatives who are demoralized, because whatever their hopes are for a Trump presidency, those dreams will not come true. (Like I said above, the only thing I'm sure about in regards to a Trump administration is that it will be a disaster.) So likewise, it will be the Democrats who are energized. Which will lead to Democratic gains in the midterms (which would mitigate any potential damage Trump could do), the White House in 2020 (assuming someone better than Hillary Clinton), and better positioning for the congressional remapping. So since you can't keep the Republicans out of the White House forever, I think it may be preferable to let them blow their wad on this clown and tarnish their brand for years to come. The 2016 election is so uniquely toxic that I think that for both candidates, winning the White House would actually act as a poison pill for their own party.

If you've read this far, you may have noticed a couple of things about my argument. First, that I've talked an awful lot about what would help the Democrats, and don't we hate them? Well...in my case, yes and no. I don't deny that they are "better" than the Republicans (although that's an absurdly low bar.) And if there's a viable leftist third party in place by 2020 I'll gladly support them, but I kind of doubt that will happen. For this essay, I'm just extrapolating the current state of things into the near future. And I'm not making any predictions about how I personally will vote four years from now.

The second thing you may have noticed is that in my essay about why I'm voting for Jill Stein, I still haven't mentioned Jill Stein. So I'll do that now. Because the mainstream media's line on those of us voting third party this year is that we're impractical pie-in-the-sky dreamers, or that we're bitter spoilers, and that above all other things, what we're doing is profoundly unrealistic. Without even getting into how offensively anti-democratic it is to use your media megaphone to advocate for ordinary voters having fewer choices, I have to say that I strongly disagree. My vote for Jill Stein is, to me, an extremely strategic vote. I know that flies in the face of all the Nader-addled logic that gets peddled in the press, but I consider my vote strategic partly for the reasons I listed above, and partly because of what I'm saying with it. I'm saying that I demand a viable option on the ballot to the left of what is currently being offered. And if I don't get it from the Democrats, I have no problem going elsewhere.

Because that's what voting is. Most of us aren't extraordinarily wealthy, and most of us certainly don't work on K Street, so that few minutes we spend in the voting booth every two years is the only real shot we have to speak our mind, to influence policy, to strike some fear into the hearts of these people. One line of compromise-thinking goes, "Yes, I'll vote for Hillary Clinton, but I plan to hold her accountable after the election." (Give me a moment here to finish laughing. I'm sure that as president, Hillary Clinton will live in constant fear that you will say something critical of her on your blog.) But on the left we keep making this mistake because we don't understand what voting is. A vote is a vote. A hold-your-nose vote counts the same as an enthusiastic one. Because if we say that we oppose so many elements of the neoliberal agenda, and then we vote for them anyway, we don't really oppose them, do we?

Because if you're in that camp, the camp that plans to vote for Hillary Clinton despite serious reservations, and is really only doing so because of Trump, just remember that when you fill in that oval on the ballot, you're not voting against anything. That is a logical impossibility. You're filling in that oval next to someone's name, and you're voting FOR everything that person stands for.

So if you vote for Hillary Clinton, what are some of the things you'll be voting FOR?

• Perpetual warfare in the Middle East

• Support for (and orchestration of) military coups to overthrow democratically-elected leaders in other parts of the world

• Neoliberal economic policy at home that will continue to exacerbate inequality

• Trade policy that, despite her sudden campaign-season change of heart, will continue to send U.S. jobs overseas, hollow out American cities and towns, and will give multinational corporations veto power over U.S. law in unaccountable foreign tribunals

• Health care still being seen as a commodity, not a right; the profit motive enshrined in our medical system

• On education, "more charters" still being the answer to everything

• The continued financialization of the U.S. economy

• Pay-to-play, cronyism, and legalized bribery still being the way business is done in Washington

• Allowing ourselves to be swayed by a little election-season progressive talk from a politician with a history of support for right-wing projects, and

• That Hillary Clinton is ultimately an acceptable candidate for the leftmost of America's two main political parties.

Just remember that your few minutes in the voting booth are the one chance you get, just once every two years, to make yourself heard by these people. And if, despite the fact that you may oppose most or all of the things I listed, when you step into the booth, you still say "Aye," then these are the things you have just voted for. And you did it with your eyes wide open. Your vote is your voice, and when your turn came to speak up about the litany of inequality, corruption, and bloodshed I listed above, you voiced your unequivocal support. All voting is unequivocal. Once done, there's no having it both ways and there is no backing out.

Me, I'll be voting "Nay." And that is the most strategic vote I can possibly cast.