As we approach election day, fellow liberals are growing ever more fretful about voting for Hillary because they think she's insufficiently progressive or too centrist or perversely pro-capitalist: sorry, but I just don't get all these convoluted arguments about where the Democratic standard-bearer stands on the liberal spectrum and whether a vote for her serves the left or not.
This election is not business as usual: it's not as if Trump is some far right wing Ted Cruz up against a too centrist Democrat, or as if he's just some unpredictable independent with some racist and misogynist tendencies against a pillar of the establishment we can't abide. And voting third party or abstaining is not just about letting another Ralph Nader put another Bush in the White House.
It's about whether the integrity of our constitutional republic that affords us the luxury of these arguments can survive the election of the deeply cynical outlaw Donald Trump. The man is many things: a thug, a bully, a racist, a bigot, a liar, a misogynist. But what has been least noticed about him is most critical: he is above all an outlaw, someone who stands outside the pale of the law and disdains what it stands for -- fairness, equality, justice and equal treatment. He is equally contemptuous of law, legality, rules, governance and legitimacy. He imagines himself in a kind of state of nature where human relations are (in the words of Thomas Hobbes) a 'war of all against all' and the life of man is nasty, brutish and short. (Life on social media?)
With an outlaw waging a campaign to become that nation's chief executive and sheriff, these are anything but normal times. We face not simply an extreme edition of what is nonetheless a normal election, where liberals need to ask whether Hillary is the right person to take the left agenda forward, or how the email morass can be parsed. Nor is it the moment to teach the Democratic Party a lesson with a third party vote or abstention, and maybe help it find some truly progressive candidates.
We stand at a pivotal historical moment when the integrity of the United States system of Democratic Republican government is at stake. What we face in Trump is not an ideological adversary but an enemy of democracy itself, of government by law. Which means it's time to stow the internal arguments until after the election and vote Hillary. The moment is more like 1860 than 2000, with the American system at stake and a civil war is being promised if Trump loses; it's more 1933 than 1980, and the prospect we face is not just of a clownish blow-hard who may actually do a few things we liberals would like to see done (keep us out of foreign wars, kill bad trade treaties), but of an ignorant thug who disdains everything America stands for, above all the rule of law.
In a word, this election is not about who our President should be but about what our country is. Elect the outlaw and we don't lose the election, we lose the country. With the new 'law of the land' defined by lawlessness.