A week ago, I received an invitation to attend a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. It came from a relative on my wife’s side of the family. Apparently she figured I’d be an easy target, simply assuming I’d be supporting Clinton because of the alternative, Donald Trump.

This kind of thinking has galled me for months. The idea that we must vote for Hillary because of the specter of a Trump presidency is typical either/or thinking that I’ve been subjected to ever since I first started voting in 1980. It’s also more of the usual reasoning that you get from spineless liberals. More on that further down in the post.

Two pathologically-damaged choices for president.

I don’t run around touting faux socialists for president like some of my friends did prior to Bernie Sanders going in the tank for Mrs. Clinton. I’m also clear on Clinton’s neoliberal policies designed to further dash the hopes of working class people across the U.S., something that so-called working class advocates from Maine that I’ve written about on this blog seem to have missed. Democrats will be Democrats, however.

Oh, and do I need to do the usual kabuki dance and list all the Republican’s political peccadilloes? They should be fairly obvious, but then again, given the drivel I’m reading about “Hillary must win, no matter what,” I’m not so sure.

Hillary Clinton has long been seen as the heir apparent to an ineffective, two-term president. Mr. Hope and Change has delivered little and dashed any hopes thinking people may have had about America. What passed for change was negligible at best.

Trump beat back a host of pathetic white, male politicians (and one woman) that were a combination of “too tired,” “too fat,” or “too stupid” to defeat a two-bit reality TV hustler. To Trump’s credit, he recognized that he could play to the fear of “the other” that’s been just below the surface for decades, if not longer in our country.

Bernie Sanders somehow energized the digitally dumbed-down—better known as our millennials—offering up heavy helpings of anti-corporate rhetoric. This also appealed to graying hippies, and other semi-progressive left-leaners. Then, as soon as Sanders recognized he wasn’t going to be the Democratic nominee, he did an abrupt about face and began supporting and stumping for a candidate joined at the hip to the worst elements of corporate corruption.

I thought Chris Hedges (one of America’s last remaining journalists) nailed liberals’ self-serving need to rally around someone as toxic and corrupt as Hillary Clinton. He wrote these two paragraphs back in August for TruthDig.. They are as good as it gets in framing all those left-of-center “friends” on Facebook, who have been consistent in their moral equivalency dances, about Hillary, why she’ll be so much more remarkable than Trump.

During the presidential election cycle, liberals display their gutlessness. Liberal organizations, such as MoveOn.org, become cloyingly subservient to the Democratic Party. Liberal media, epitomized by MSNBC, ruthlessly purge those who challenge the Democratic Party establishment. Liberal pundits, such as Paul Krugman, lambaste critics of the political theater, charging them with enabling the Republican nominee. Liberals chant, in a disregard for the facts, not to be like Ralph Nader, the “spoiler” who gave us George W. Bush.

The liberal class refuses to fight for the values it purports to care about. It is paralyzed and trapped by the induced panic manufactured by the systems of corporate propaganda. The only pressure within the political system comes from corporate power. With no counterweight, with no will on the part of the liberal class to defy the status quo, we slide deeper and deeper into corporate despotism. The repeated argument of the necessity of supporting the “least worse” makes things worse.

The installation of Hillary Clinton in the White House will simply ensure that the policies representing the elite consensus in America—a more aggressive foreign policy, directed mainly against China and Russia, as well as cracking down on the democratic rights of anti-corporate grassroots organizers (like our son, Mark), while making sure that working class living standards continue to decline.

Clinton will ensure that big business reigns supreme. Her presidency will mean unfettered neoliberal economic policies. But to liberals that’s all well and good because of the two corporate candidates, “theirs” is the best choice.

Here is some telling stuff from In Defense of Marxism, on who Hillary Clinton represents as a candidate. It sure as hell isn’t the working class. It’s also not what America’s corporate water carriers at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR are putting forth.

Voting won’t change anything in America. And short of casting my vote for a fringe candidate like Jerry White, of the Socialist Equality Party (a true socialist, unlike Bernie Sanders), I’m not toeing the corporate line this election.