Heads up: this one’s for American citizens. The rest of you can pass this one over, or peek at it for a shot of either schadenfreude or fear, depending on your predilictions and assumptions. It’s your call.

The election, at the time of writing, is in ten days. It’s on Tuesday, November 5th. If you haven’t made a plan to vote yet, you should do that! You might also be able to vote early, but if you can’t, your employer may be legally required to give you the time and space to go do it. I learned while writing this that the law doesn’t exist in twelve states; they’re not even the ones you’re probably thinking of. Bananas. Anyway, Vote.gov is a great site that will give you the information you need.

There are two possible options in this election. And, to be honest with you, I can’t believe we are even having a conversation about it.

One of them is a convicted felon who 14 members of his prior administration, including former Chief of Staff John Kelly, call a “fascist” who admires dictators and has praised Adolf Hitler multiple times. He seeks to mass-deport 15-20 million people by way of deploying the military against civilians and interning them in camps. In his last administration, he transformed the American judicial system, installing over two hundred judges and three Supreme Court justices who are loyal to his nationalist ideology. He will ramp up nuclear weapons proliferation, and has asked why we can’t use them, including against hurricanes. He is a proponent of States’ rights, a dog-whistle that speaks to a desire to avoid federally mandated desegegation, marriage equality, and reproductive rights. He has consistently demonized minority groups in increasingly-unhinged rallies that are reminiscent of a very dark era of the 20th century. He is a racist fomer reality TV star who doesn’t pay his bills.

The other is Kamala Harris, who is running on a platform that has been described as “pragmatic moderate”. On the hard right, people complain, falsely, that she’s a Marxist (oh, the humanity!); on the left, people complain about her focus on US military might and her lack of firm action around the ongoing suffering in Gaza. Voters like me would prefer a candidate who sits politically to the left of her, the very fact that any of the Cheneys, let alone the war criminal patriarch, feel comfortable standing anywhere near her makes me very uncomfortable, but she very clearly is not any of the things I just described about Donald Trump.

There are other candidates, but each of them, or submitting a blank or spoiled ballot, is, in effect, a vote for Trump.

So, look.

I do not think Biden is perfect, and he was not my preferred Democratic candidate in 2020 (that was Elizabeth Warren). For one thing, he’s tough on immigration in ways I don’t like; the number of deportations under his watch is on track to match the number in Trump’s first term. (When people say Harris is soft on the border, it is not based in fact.) For another, he’s furthered American militarism overseas in all kinds of ways. I do not think Harris is perfect either, and there will be a lot of continuous work to do to pressure her administration to do the right thing both domestically and internationally. There is a lot to do, no matter which candidate, to undo the worst of the effects of American influence internationally. (She has actually been one of the most liberal representatives, while arguably not going far enough; both things can be true.)

But to say that the two candidacies are equivalently bad is bad-faith nonsense. One promises the same kind of American Presidency we’ve experienced, more or less, for better and for worse, for generations (the people calling Harris a Marxist are either idiots or out to mislead you; in my opinion we could use a great deal more European-style social democracy, which we simply aren’t going to get). The other is something that will take America to a darker, more authoritarian place for generations.

My ask is just this: that you take stock, decide what your values really are, and vote based on those values all the way down the ballot, from the President through to your local representatives. I’m making no secret of how I’m casting my vote or which values I think are important. Yours are entirely up to you.