On Nov. 8 I will be going to the polls and voting, without hesitation or disinclination, for Hillary Clinton. But what a treacherous and unforgivable act this will be for my father, who will no doubt be supporting the only presidential candidate he believes has any chance of saving the United States from almost certain ruin: Alyson Kennedy.

You have probably never heard of Alyson Kennedy until now, and neither have you heard of her running mate, Osborne Hart, unless you happen to be a member of the Socialist Workers Party, as my father has been for the past 50 years, or you happen to have passed in recent months a folding table on a city street and been handed campaign literature explaining that “the only way forward is to organize independent working-class struggles that point toward overturning the dictatorship of capital.” This is the exact sentiment, word for word, that my family subscribed to when I was growing up, a sentiment that can be traced all the way back to Marx, and that held great power over me as a child, and that holds some power over me still, but that seems to hold no power over almost anyone else, including the working class.

It’s worth noting that Ms. Kennedy is a white woman, and Mr. Hart is a black man. But lest you think the Socialist Workers Party is opportunistically mimicking the Democratic Party, you should know that it has a long record of nominating women and nonwhite men for national office. Forty-four years before Barack Obama, there was Clifton DeBerry, and before Mrs. Clinton, there was Linda Jenness in 1972. The party once even nominated a man born in a foreign country and a woman under the age of 35, running together on the same ticket, neither of whom, needless to say, would have been constitutionally eligible to assume office if they had somehow managed to get elected.

How many votes has any Socialist Workers Party candidate received? Sometimes a few thousand, sometimes tens of thousands, once 90,000, but that was 1976. No matter. The objective is not to amass votes but to participate in politics using whatever means the capitalist system has allowed so as to eventually be able to overthrow the capitalist system. To vote for a Socialist Workers Party candidate is not necessarily a “protest vote,” or at least not the kind we have come to associate with third-party candidates like Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, but rather it is a protest vote insofar as one’s entire existence is a state of protest — which was certainly true for my family.