The 2016 election has already reduced social media to a hateful shouting match of the most cataclysmic scale. It can be difficult to gauge who bothers me more: the noxious “pragmatism” of HRC, the slimy serial killer McCarthyism of Cruz, the George Wallace-like demagoguery of Donald Trump's white nationalist platform, or just to be bothered by how much all of this bothers me.

But what disappoints me most, partially precisely because I am sympathetic to the exhausted mindset that produces it, are the Bernie and Busters. They are, I must say first of all, a movement without support from their candidate. Bernie Sanders himself has stressed, repeatedly, that he will fiercely work to oppose the election of a Republican candidate at all costs. And little wonder, considering that the leading GOP candidate has repurposed slogans and talking points straight out of the Stormfront White Nationalist playbook.

I recognize the frustrating fixed game nature of the bipartisan system, I comprehend the attitude that fuels the Bernie or Busters, but this does not change the fact that they are advocating we make sacrifices now (of people who have not volunteered themselves for sacrifice) for the sake of some speculative future reward.

To act like Donald Trump is the same person as Hillary Clinton is not only a treacherous false equivalency straight out of the South Park generation, but it is an argument that comes directly from privilege. There are those among us who can see very well the tangible differences between these candidates, differences that could prove disastrous.

Speak of making a noble stand for your political theories to the thousands of Syrian refugees who will be barred safe haven in the United States under a Trump administration, sent back to certain death. Quote Chomsky to the millions who would be at risk of losing Obamacare. Grandstand on the noxious nature of spineless liberalism in front of those countless Yazidis, Kurds, and Assyrians that would be left high and dry in the face of Trump's misguided pandering to Vladimir Putin. Arab Americans and Americans of Middle Eastern backgrounds are already experiencing terror, harassment, and stabbings on the street, and this is only the primary stage of the Trump experience. He has given a greenlight, a coming out party, to the ugliest aspects of our national character. He is on the record, when not constantly shifting his position, that women seeking abortions should be punished in some way.

Is it, therefore, no surprise that the bulk of Bernie and Busters are patchouli white males? When you have nothing at stake, it's a lot simpler to propose a noble ideological stand.

Those who advocate that we sit on the sidelines as a generation in the following national election are just preaching a form of incrementalism even more noxious than Clinton's, something I indeed did not think possible. They speak from their own social and racial privileges, proposing: "Let's just wait until things slowly disintegrate to the point where like, society crumbles and there's like, a revolution bro! Trump will be so bad that surely a progressive victory will follow!" This entirely speculative argument packs the intellectual sophistication of a zombie apocalypse survival fantasy and hints that they think they have the privilege to last long enough through sustained mainstream white nationalism to reap the benefits of this apparently impending societal collapse.

The eerily prophetic words of the Sierra Club to Ralph Nader in the 2000 election come to mind, a time where Nader's disappointment with the limitations of Clinton/Gore environmentalist policy led him to the spiteful conclusion: that the election of one of the most disastrously anti-environmentalist administrations in recent memory was a justifiable bloodletting. He believed George W. Bush would be a short term pain that would surely result in long term progress, and sneered uncompromisingly at those even among his own supporters who were not willing to be stalwart ideologues until the end. It was in this context that Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, famously admonished Nader: "Irresponsible as I find your strategy, I accept that you genuinely believe in it. Please accept that I, and the overwhelming majority of the environmental movement in this country, genuinely believe that your strategy is flawed, dangerous and reckless. Until you can answer how you will protect the people and places who will be put in harm's way, or destroyed, by a Bush presidency, you have no right to slander those who disagree with you as 'servile.'"

I come with the same words to the Bernie and Busters. Will you form glorious people's militias to defend members of the LGBT and Arab American communities? Can you guarantee the safety of those whose only defense from the human genocide and barrel bombs of Bashar al-Assad is a continuation of Obama policy? Or is it, perhaps, that you have weighed their lives and find their weight lacking when posed against the purity of your ideology?

I am glad to say, Bernie Sanders has more foresight and love for the short term and long term suffering of the American people than Ralph Nader ever did. I can only hope that those who express their admiration for his cause are willing to follow him when he inevitably leads the push to unite the Democratic Party and oppose those Republican reactionaries who would roll back the few kernels of progress we have managed to achieve. Or will they turn on him and decry him as a spineless liberal sacrificing his scruples?

Eight years of Ronald Reagan throwing the mentally ill onto the street and contracting illegal arms deals did not, in fact, result in a glorious social utopia. The Roman Empire did not fall in a day.