Tallying only the days since Hillary Clinton officially announced her candidacy for president, this election season has been going on for nearly 19 months.

I, as a socialist, am exhausted.

It is not just a personal disgruntlement with the monotony of election coverage that gets to me—though, to be sure, I certainly look forward to the day when I no longer have to see Donald Trump's face on TV every time I walk into JJ's. This nearly two-year election season has sucked up millions of activist hours and more money than any election in history (estimates vary, but are hovering around five to six billion dollars). All this in a period when exploited and oppressed people across the country have been rising up and fighting just to be heard.

Now, two years down the road, all of this organizing has nearly reaped the fruits of its labor: the election of either one of the two most unpopular candidates in U.S. history—her, or of course, the bigoted rapist.

Since Clinton's April 2015 announcement of her intent to run for president, we have seen urban rebellions in three American cities—Baltimore, Milwaukee, and most recently Charlotte—fighting back against racist police terror. Beyond the rebellions, the Movement for Black Lives has been supported by demonstrations and marches in nearly every other major city in the U.S. and even here at Columbia. Low-wage workers in cities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. have stood up for an end to poverty wages and won a transition to a $15/hr minimum wage. And, as I write this op-ed, indigenous people from across the United States and Canada continue to gather in North Dakota, despite massive police repression, brutality, and arrest, to say no to the Dakota Access Pipeline. All over the United States and the world, the people who have taken the brunt of the beating that capitalism dishes out every day are putting up a fight against business as usual. So why aren't the two "realistic" candidates acting like it?

Trump's response to every one of these movements would be wholly dismissed if not for the mobs of racists supporting him. He has called the lowest wages in decades "too high," responded to police brutality by calling for more police power, and invested one million dollars in the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline. And this is not to mention the overwhelming racism and misogyny that has dominated his campaign from day one.

On the other side of the aisle, Clinton's response has also been underwhelming at best. By standing against the fight for $15, calling instead for a $12/hr minimum wage; by chastising protesters in Baltimore for their resistance to police terror in a city that protected Freddie Gray's killers better than it protects Black people; and by calling for "serious discussion" between indigenous people and their assailants while U.S. capital destroys their land and water, Clinton has openly demonstrated her hypocrisy in claiming anything in common with the people revolting under the Democratic Party's regime.

But some of these activists, including many at Columbia, will still vote for her on Tuesday for all the best reasons. They will say that this election is about stopping Trump, and if that means holding their noses and voting for Clinton, then that's what they'll do.

Stopping Trump-ism is obviously a crucial task facing the left of this country; no matter what we can really expect or not expect from Trump's White House, his mere presence on the political scene has already emboldened the far right and led to devastating racist violence. Continuing to vote Democrat, however, will never bring about a force capable of truly defending or representing our society's most marginalized. Unless we stop electing "liberals" who were instrumental in constructing mass incarceration, whose policies have not only failed to halt but also accelerated the polarization in income and wealth, and who show a gross neglect for the worst humanitarian crisis on Earth, the Syrian refugee crisis, then Trumpist bigotry will continue to gain a mass hearing unopposed.

When Election Day (finally) comes around, I'm going to invest my vote in Jill Stein and the Green Party. The working class and masses of oppressed people in this country desperately need a left alternative to the two parties of capitalism and imperialism, and if a Green vote is the best way I can support that goal electorally, then that's what I'll do.

But let's talk about what needs to happen from Nov. 9, the day after the election, and onward: As Howard Zinn famously said, "What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in." Starting on Nov. 9, the profound lowering of activists' expectations that accompanies every election season will end, and our side will have our work cut out for us in fighting for a democratically-run world free from oppression and exploitation in all its forms.

Clinton's administration very well may be the one to pass a $15/hour minimum wage, to take a stand for indigenous self-determination, to begin dismantling mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex as a whole. If these changes occur, however, it will be because working people rise up and force it, and not because a few good-willed politicians are looking out for the little guy.

On Nov. 9, I won't care whether you abstained or voted for Clinton, Stein, or practically anyone other than Trump. If you plan to spend the next 1,460 days before another presidential election fighting like hell against the international systems impoverishing, disenfranchising, and murdering marginalized people of all stripes, then you are my comrade. Let's join together, let's build on the movements that exist, and let's get organized so that we're better able to respond to the new ones that will arise.

Together, let's make sure that the millions of people looking for an alternative to this rotten, rigged system are heard.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in philosophy. He currently serves on the elected leadership of the Barnard Columbia Socialists and is a member of the International Socialist Organization.

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