We have nothing to lose by trying?

There is no contesting that Hillary is a right-center candidate who will seriously disappoint those who have been burnishing her “progressive” bona fides for the past several months. Her “pragmatic” approach to government will result in a lot of deals with recalcitrant Republicans that trade on important progressive interests in order to get bills through. She has a hawkish perspective on foreign affairs; she has a corporatist perspective on economic policy. All true.

So if it were the case, this election, that we were being asked to select between Hillary and another right/right-center candidate, like a Jeb! or a Marco, then maybe there truly would be “nothing to lose” by using this election to build the foundations of a viable national Green party. If you throw the presidential election to the Republicans, so be it. (Whether history corroborates this strategy — speaking here specifically of Nader and whether Gore and GWBush were truly fungible — is something I seriously question, but I’ll set that observation aside.)

But I believe that Trump threatens something truly and awfully different. He has made clear that he has no particular concern for policy; he will sign most of the bills a Republican Congress sends him. This is how he’s gotten the support of the GOP establishment and most Republican leaders. So he will be a right-wing president, too. But he will also bring to the office an utter contempt for the rule of law and an unquestioned confidence in his own authoritarian vision. He will assert extraordinary executive power, and the checks and balances built into our system will fail as the conservatives in Congress and the courts decide that it is better to side with him than against him. His advisers will not constrain him, because he will select only yes-men to give him advice.

If you don’t believe me, observe how closely he’s following the playbook of other authoritarian leaders in eastern Europe and around Russia’s periphery. It’s the same tactics, the same steps, and they’ll lead to the same result — the deterioration of the rule of law and the imposition of a durable tyranny. In many of these nations, debates over giving leftist parties a toehold in the national politics would seem awfully quaint, in retrospect.

Besides which, there are several national priorities where Trump and Hillary would be truly different and not just cut of the same cloth. Hillary is likely not going to reverse Citizens United, but Citizens United is not the only case on campaign speech we need to worry about. Hillary is far more likely than Trump to appoint Supreme Court justices who will not take the next step in rolling back campaign finance reform, which is abolishing all limits on campaign donations apart from true quid-pro-quo cash and federal matching. Hillary is also more likely to appoint justices who will uphold Roe v. Wade and the court’s recent same-sex marriage rulings and who will not look for excuses to undermine Obamacare. Trump’s appointments, drawn from the GOP wishlist, will go on the warpath against these holdings.

Hillary may not dramatically alter our neoconservative course in geopolitics, but Trump offers something profoundly worse. We are correct in being exhausted and frustrated by the United States’ expensive global military entanglements, but Trump’s promised withdrawal from the global stage will pull out an important pillar that currently supports the weak, imperfect international legal order we currently have and that maintains what peace we have been able to maintain. A U.S. that does not play NATO brinkmanship with Russia is one that stands by while Putin invades nations on Russia’s periphery with impunity; a U.S. that leaves southeast Asia to fend for itself is one that concedes centuries of international law on maritime borders to Chinese whim; a U.S. that walks away from rapprochement with Iran is one that watches as Israel launches into full-out war with its neighbors. Hillary does not promise us peace, but Trump promises us war.

I absolutely agree that we need a strong, national Green party (or some other third-party, progressive option), and I appreciate how voting for a presidential candidate seems like a way to jump-start a movement towards it. But we have to think carefully about our strategy and the context in which we pursue it. I believe that the focus should be on building grassroots support, winning local and state-level offices, organizing communities and workplaces, and demonstrating the efficacy and value of a truly progressive vision. Let’s show how Green city councils get things done; then how Green mayors get things done; then how Green governors get things done; then how Green presidents get things done. Let’s show how workers and community members can organize and stand up for themselves, without having to petition establishment politicians for crumbs.

That might sound unacceptably incremental, but you have to ask: why hasn’t this already been done? How can you hope to make the national case for the Green party, if this hasn’t been done? The answer is that we have fundamentally failed to engage the Bernie-enthused electorate in elections and campaigns between presidential elections. That’s quite by design, and continuing to focus on a likely futile campaign for Jill Stein only perpetuates that counterproductive dynamic. If our revolution is to be effective and lasting, we can’t do it with a single vote for a single candidate in a single year. We need groundwork, a record, and the appearance of inevitability.

Jill Stein says all the right things, but at root she’s a politician like the rest. Her concerns are with her own job, her own party. Her priorities are making the case for what’s best for her party, not what’s best for the country. We would do well to remember that.