Knowing everything I know about Hillary Clinton and the Clintons and voting for her anyway feels like the nadir of my political life.

I never want to be here again.

As a socialist, I’m watching Wall Street and white nationalism make hay out of a worldwide crisis in global capitalism. The left’s popularized the notion of an alternative but we’re nowhere near the nuts-and-bolts of it yet.

As a peace activist, I’m seeing the crash and burn of the imperial order militarize our lives in blood-curdling ways while we utterly fail to build anything like a commensurate movement for internationalism and peace.

As a feminist,  I am agonized, as murderous men around the world dress up misogyny as liberation  neoliberalism wraps itself in feminism and I’m left with a hawk to vote for because she’s the alternative to a pleased-as-punch patriarch who is just as bellicose and all-too credibly accused of assault and rape.

In a movement-building movement one thing could not be clearer. Race is the place where the rubber of our forward momentum towards a people and planet-loving future hits the road of rabid reaction.

History’s on our side. Our electoral system isn’t. I get that. Still it’s been hard to find the Green Party (which has always, before now, got my vote), in Jena or Ferguson or Baltimore or Charlotte. They’re still polling at just 2% after all this action. Meanwhile, the multi-racial movements that will lead us through this thicket can barely catch their breaths between killings and death threats.

This election season, reaction won. People are feeling more terrified than they are bold and I am one of them. We need our organizers alive, not dead and not deported or locked-up, and (while they will still be spied-on) I happen to believe there’s a greater chance of survival if we renounce as loudly as possible the authoritarian white nationalism of trumpismo and  DonaldTrump.

In New York, I am thankful that I can vote for Hillary Clinton on the Working Families Party line. Tomorrow, that’s just what I’ll do.

But even as I rue this day, I re-commit. This week’s episode of The Laura Flanders Show features a dozen forward-looking leaders talking about what recommitment looks like. Take a look. Dust off, plug in and let’s get from this grim place to somewhere better before 2020.

Laura Flanders is the host of The Laura Flanders Show and a contributor to False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Clinton as well as the author of BushWomen; Tales of a Cynical Species. 

Laura Flanders

Laura Flanders is the host of  "RadioNation" heard on Air America Radio and syndicated to non-commercial affiliates nationwide. She is the author most recently, of Blue Grit: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (The Penguin Press, 2007) and also BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso, 2004), an investigation into the women in George W. Bush's Cabinet. Publisher's Weekly called Flanders' New York Times best-seller, "fierce, funny and intelligent."The W Effect: Sexual Politics in the Age of Bush, an essay collection compiled by Flanders, appeared in June, 2004 from the Feminist Press.Before joining Air America when it launched in March 2004, Laura hosted the award-winning " Your Call," Monday-Friday, on public radio, KALW, 91.7 fm in San Francisco.Flanders' TV appearances include "Lou Dobbs Tonight" and "Paula Zahn Now"  as well as "The O'Reilly Factor," and "Hannity and Colmes," "Washington Journal," "Donahue," "Good Morning America" and the CBC news discussion program, "CounterSpin."Her writing appears in The Nation, Alternet, Ms. Magazine,  and elsewhere and her op-ed pieces have appeared in papers including The San Francisco Chronicle.Flanders was founding director of the Women's Desk at the media watch group, FAIR and for more than ten years she produced and hosted CounterSpin, FAIR's nationally-syndicated radio program. Shie is also the author of Real Majority, Media Minority; the Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting (Common Courage Press, 1997) about which Susan Faludi wrote, "If only there were a hundred of her." Katha Pollitt called it "Funny, angry, factfilled and brilliant."