I get it.

You found a candidate that agrees with your views and doesn’t carry the stinky baggage that political “insiders” seem to carry. When your candidate was eliminated, you were left with a binary choice that quite frankly does not excite you. But I beg of you: please do not sit this election out and refuse to vote for Hillary.

This will be the first year I am voting for President, though I have been a registered voter for two previous elections. My hesitation towards voting is still with me. I firmly believe that most people vote uninformed and that a reckless vote is worse than a non-vote. My decision to abstain from voting for the previous two Presidential elections most likely fits into a #NeverHillary mindset: both major party candidates included at least one thing in their platform I considered to be a deal-breaker. Add on the fact that the states I was registered to vote in weren’t even close to swing states, so I was pretty sure my vote would be a waste. Voting symbolically or to give a candidate moral support wasn’t in the cards because they both supported things I considered deal-breakers.

This time around, I can understand why Bernie-or-bust people are saying they won’t vote for Hillary. Decades in Washington have left her with suspicious relationships, more than a few regrettable past positions, and likely a foreign policy that seems reprehensible to you. But this time is much different. To people who defend their non-vote with a cry of her shortcomings being some sort of moral equivalency to Trump: are you kidding?

Unlike the Obama-Romney or Obama-McCain elections, a more-of-two-evils candidate actually threatens the future of the republic this election. Trump has already done damage to our credibility abroad and brought out of the woodwork people and views in America that a lot of us hoped were a relic of the 1950s. Since I’m targeting this post to Bernie supporters, I’m going to skip over any explanation for how bad and morally repugnant Trump is. The point is that, unlike a Mitt Romney or John McCain victory, putting Trump in the White House would do irreparable damage. You thought Bush was bad? He never threatened Federal judges or to default on Treasury debt. One could make the argument that the worst parts of a Bush Presidency are things that will take decades to recover from. But I’m convinced the country, and likely the world, would never recover fully from a Trump Presidency. Bush’s faults are miniscule compared to the damage Trump would do.

I recently spoke with a #NeverHillary Bernie supporter who welcomed the idea of a Trump Presidency because he thought it would speed up the process of getting to a Bernie utopia. Things would get so bad under Trump, the reasoning goes, that the country would have no choice but to turn to a politician like Bernie. This scorched-earth philosophy is misguided in mainly two ways. First, thinking economic/social/political catastrophe will end in your favored result is an insanely big risk to take. A quick gander at history shows that economic depressions and episodes of massive political carnage are just as likely to end up going to the extreme on the other side as the extreme to the side you favor. When the dust settles after the disaster of a Trump Presidency, who’s to say people won’t be even angrier and more drawn to identity politics and xenophobia than they are now?

The second way is that the country as we know it may not survive a Trump Presidency. The American experiment in the last few centuries is a pretty delicate thing. The Civil War showed, among other things, how a single-issue can divide the country apart and test the balances between states rights and the Federal government. A century and a half later, this divide is still around. The Cold War pitted centralized planning versus economic liberalism and the outcome was never a sure thing (my 8 months of living during a world with the Soviet Union were very formative on me). Every step forward in civil rights has been met with backlash and a question of how much freedom the public as a whole wants to grant people. a Trump Presidency could actually be the ultimate test.

The delicacy of liberalism is the rule, rather than the exception, throughout history. For all that Trump campaigns on, he never uses rhetoric based on the words “liberty” or “freedom.” We all have different definitions of what these words mean or to what extent we value liberty over other political goals. But Trump doesn’t value them at all. Censorship of the press, removal of judicial independence, religious litmus testing for not only migrants but also citizens…these are things that would threaten the underlying ethos of America and what I consider to be the political intellectual descendants of the Enlightenment. Trump would send us back to the Dark Ages.

When I think of the last eight or so years when I started to become focused on policy and developed a generally libertarian viewpoint, the political issues I vehemently disagreed with people on seem laughably minor compared to the issues this election. Fighting over the employment effects of a $9 versus $7.25 Federal minimum wage was an adorable quibble during a time when we could wake up knowing politicians weren’t going to say women who had abortions should be punished under the law. Arguing over how to price parking in cities or the efficacy of a 3-cent tax on carbonated beverages is embarrassingly trivial compared to the issues that Trump brings to the global political landscape.

I will say that, within a window of what we might call the status quo political landscape, Hillary will actually be a pretty damn good President. After decades of being in “the game,” she knows how to play it and get stuff done. I think Obama’s first term was filled with surprises of how realistic a President needs to be when working with an opposition Congress. Hillary is a seasoned vet in the landscape and will know how to work the system. My libertarian dreams of nearly-open borders and total drug legalization probably won’t happen under her. But under reasonable expectations, I think she has the ability to be a better two-term President than Obama.

Hillary has her faults, do not get me wrong. I still think a lot of her economic plans are foolish and misguided/ineffective efforts to help the poor. Her hawkishness on foreign policy makes me very uncomfortable. The e-mail stuff does not sit well. I still think there are a lot of squeamish parallels between the Underwoods and the Clintons. In most other elections, I could understand not wanting to endorse some of her baggage by refusing to vote for her. But this election is much different. A Trump victory is something we may not recover from.

So please, Berners, get out there and save the Republic.

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