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If you’re someone who desperately clings to the wreckage of reason and objective reality in the storm that is American politics, you probably call yourself a liberal. Some of you may go even further than that.

Bernie Sanders, then, might come as a bit of a shock to those of us who have watched year after year of business as usual in Washington. The man is a Democratic Socialist, representing a desire for the sort of outstanding success such democracies have had in the Scandinavian states.

Ever cautious, you hesitate to endorse a potential Sanders presidency. You’ve been fooled in the past. How could someone who has spent so much time in Washington, having gained such widespread popularity on a populist message, be genuine? When will the veil be lifted and the trickery be revealed?

Perhaps there truly is no dishonesty in the Sanders campaign. Maybe Sanders does intend to accomplish everything he says he will. But does that mean you should make the effort to cast a vote for him?

Even after having reckoned with the notion that Sanders would be the best choice for the country, you may have been influenced by the works of even further left thinkers like Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn. These men are giants in leftist political theory for the modern era. When you read them, you feel as though everything finally makes sense.

A summation of their message: the structure of the state and the capitalist economic model are inherently flawed and imminently corruptible. This means that even if we were to elect Bernie Sanders, it would be for naught. The system would find a means of self-correcting.

This is not an implausible scenario. For an example, one need look no further than the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s. The economy began to tank as the government imposed regulations on the corporations in the state, who then reacted by effectively committing business suicide on multiple fronts to demonstrate their displeasure at being forced to work within a strict socialist framework of operation.

Once other economic powers took notice of what was happening in Chile as their profits began to suffer, they began formulating strategies of how to alter the situation to suit better their interests. Other actors, namely Henry Kissinger, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, as well as the Nixon administration, took extreme measures to instigate a coup that eventually resulted in the overthrow of the Allende government. They chose someone much more friendly to their ideals as a replacement: Augusto Pinochet.

This is the neoliberal economic doctrine and neo-fascist politics at their worst. But if it happened then, who is to say it couldn’t happen now?

We are then forced to confront our current realities. And when we do, the vision before us is nowhere near as abysmal as it has been in prior election cycles. Yes, we have those familiar names, the Clintons and the Bushes. But Bernie Sanders is different. Not because he offers a populist message, not because he’s genuine and possibly a bit eccentric, especially in his hair and attitude, but because of what he represents for the United States of America.

Bernie is a major step forward for progressives in this country. Face it, the Green Party candidate who perfectly reflects your political and ethical goals is not going to get many votes. Not this election cycle, at least. But Bernie? He could win.

Bernie is vastly superior to the deeply-entrenched establishment authority carried by Hillary Clinton. And while he may not be as effective as he hopes, and he may find that he’s as much a servant to powerful money interests as Barack Obama was before him (another would-be revolutionary, relegated to mere damage control and fighting wars of attrition), he is bringing something new to the table that could shape our politics for years to come.

If we elect Bernie Sanders, we may not get everything we want. In fact, I’d hazard to guess we won’t get everything we want. He’d still have to wrangle with Congress and bureaucrats and interest groups like any other president. He may even have a weaker foreign policy than his competitors.

But Bernie opens the door for every other left-leaning political organization to gain some ground in this country finally. We live in a new era where the horrors of what happened in Chile would be met with massive resistance from millions of Americans who are plugged into what’s going on at every moment across the country.

If we elect Bernie Sanders, that alone will signify progress. Much more so than electing our first African American president has or our first woman president would.

So liberals, socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, even communists, if you want your voices to be amplified, support Bernie Sanders. If you do, you may be contributing more to your dreams of a better future than you could have any other way.