It was an amazing transformation to see: Here were all these hard-core, politically progressive persons steadfastly maintaining that Bernie Sanders was the best and only viable candidate in the United States presidential election of 2016. And for good reason. He was promising them a revolution, and it looked like he was indeed taking the masses city by city up to the gates of the towering castle, at which point the masses would barge in and seize power from the crooked kings and queens. A new day was indeed coming in which the American people would rule.

And then, suddenly, faced with the prospect of becoming a political “spoiler”, Sanders did a dirty thing, in the eyes of many of his own supporters: He left them standing outside the castle gates in the cold, while he went inside and joined the Democratic Party establishment for tea and cakes. When he came back outside, he had changed his mind. His supporters must now vote for Hillary Clinton as the next U.S. president, he told them. His campaign from that point on welcomed and endorsed Clinton at every turn.

Many of Sanders’ ardent supporters turned and left him behind, disgusted, and went over to the Green Party and elsewhere to help them continue the march up to the castle walls again. But many other Sanders supporters did as they were told, and in a single day, many of them who had been vilifying Hillary Clinton for months were now ready to support her. I watched on Facebook as otherwise intelligent, politically conscious, liberal-minded friends of mine now turned to Hillary Clinton as the only real choice for the next U.S. president. But what could account for that dramatic turnaround? Why had Public Enemy No. 1 in the Democratic Party now suddenly become hip, in vogue, the only candidate of choice for American liberal voters?

Fear. Raw fear. Fear at the thought of a Republican Party monster (the latest one in a long line of them) occupying the president’s chair in the White House in Washington DC.

And not only were your liberal friends deathly afraid, they wanted you to be afraid too of Donald Trump as a possible successor to Barack Obama. And if you weren’t afraid, then you personally would be held responsible by Hillary Clinton’s flock of supporters the day after the elections for being the ones who let Trump take power. Yes, fear is in the air, and the fearmongering has been flying wildly from both the left and the right this campaign season.

Most citizens of the United States, according to public opinion surveys, do not really trust either Trump or Clinton. That alone says tons about who both candidates are and what they represent: the elite 1 percent of U.S. society and the interests of Wall Street. Republicans at least are honest about being bought off; Democrats, on the other hand, have been in a state of psychological denial about it for decades (if not longer). But the truth is that the political party machinery of both parties is corrupt and has been so for a long time, as history teaches us.

Is this what the mighty American democracy has come to in the 21st century — voting for a candidate because you’re so afraid that the other person might win instead? What happened to freedom of choice? Do Americans go shopping for homes, cars, TVs, cereal, toilet paper or what have you, and buy something only because they’re scared to death that the other products won’t work right? Do they marry someone because the other possible choices for a life-partner frighten them out of their wits? No, of course not. They choose based on what they like, trust or respect about a product or a person. This is human nature.

But then a U.S. presidential election comes along, and we’re supposed to throw all human nature out of the window and vote out of pure fear instead? But this is the way things work in the USA — we have a political duopoly, I hear some American liberals saying. We have to deal with the system we have, with reality.

Ah, reality. Such a fickle thing to define. Well, all I can say in response to those liberals about reality is that this may be the way it is in the USA, but that’s sure not the way it is in many other countries. The Green Party is well represented in the parliaments of several nations. Here in Japan, in addition to the two major political parties that resemble the Republican and Democratic parties of the USA, we also have represented in parliament members of the socialist party (shudder!) and the communist party (shock!), not to mention the political wing of the Soka Gakkai religious organization (read: cult). And the grand irony is that this Japanese political diversity is due in part to the “reforms” pushed on Japan by the U.S. government during the American occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952. Now, if Americans can give the gift of political diversity to a country like Japan, a former enemy in war, then why can’t they demand such political diversity for themselves at home? Think on that one for a while.

There is a lot of talk these days about the need for a third party in the U.S., since the country only has a two-party system at present. But that too is not quite correct. What the people of the United States have, in reality, is one party with two factions. Call it the “Demopublican Party” or the “Republocratic Party”, if you like, but the fact is that Americans essentially have a one-party, two-faction political system in place. One party, two factions. What they really need now is a viable second party that stands independently from both the Democrats and Republicans, and offers some real choices.

The season of fear that we are seeing now in the United States takes me back to another time in U.S. history — to the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan ran for president twice on the Republican Party ticket and won by a large margin both times. Democratic Party voters in large numbers tripped and trampled over each other on the way to the polls to vote for this war-mongering, air-headed, ex-actor Republican in order to get him into the White House. Never mind that people like me were warning of the dire economic consequences of a Reagan presidency on the majority of working people throughout the country.

More than three decades later, we still feel the harsh effects of those Reagan-era policies. And now, in 2016, Democrats want all of us to give them our support so they can put another representative of the 1 percent in office? As this recent news report shows, Hillary Clinton, not Trump, is now the candidate of choice among the wealthy class of U.S. citizens. How can either one of them even remotely deal with the problems facing most working Americans?

The last time I voted for a Democratic Party candidate was in those same 1980s, when I voted for Rev. Jesse Jackson for U.S. president. Jesse was a lot less conservative in those days than he is now, and really promised to shake up the U.S. political establishment. But then I watched as the Democrats (yes, including Bill Clinton) moved to the right and increasingly betrayed every single bloc of voters who put them into office: Blacks, Latinos, women, working people of all backgrounds. It sickened me. I haven’t voted Democrat since then, and I’m not about to restart now.

Presidential elections in the U.S. these days bring to mind for me the words of the late African American leader Malcolm X. When he was alive, Malcolm characterized the Republican and Democratic parties as a wolf and a fox, respectively. One of those parties, the wolf, will make no pretenses about eating you alive on the spot, Malcolm noted. The other party, the fox, will lure you alone deep into the forest with a sly grin and promises of security, then eat you alive. Whichever party you turn to, Malcolm said, you’re dealing with a breed of dirty dog. He was obviously referring to the two parties in relation to Black folks and the prevalence of racism in U.S. society, but as the years go on, I can’t help but see the wisdom in Malcolm X’s political analysis for us all.

I’ve only started voting again in recent years in U.S. elections, which I admit was a mistake. I should have never dropped out. But the rise of other parties — the Green Party on the left and Libertarian Party on the right, among several others on the political landscape — has given me reason to get back into the game again. And it appears there are many, many other people out there who have felt the same way I have about the whole thing.

And if fear hasn’t been a bad enough problem in this U.S. presidential election campaign this year, President Obama recently inserted a healthy dose of guilt as well into the minds of the electorate when he said in a speech that he would take it as a personal “insult” if Black folks in the U.S. did not show their support for him and his presidential legacy by voting for Hillary Clinton in the coming election. So, now we have fear and guilt as the two prime motivations for voting for Clinton. But fear and guilt are negatives, and many people, myself included, want to vote for someone instead of against someone. Being offered the choice between voting for a forest fire or a flash flood still leaves you, in the end, with a disaster waiting to happen. So it is with Trump and Clinton.

So, the next time one of your “liberal” friends comes up to you and wants to lay a guilt trip on you and put you into Fear Mode with the mere thought of Donald Trump becoming the next American president, straighten them out and tell it like it is. No reasonable-minded human being wants to see Trump take office and divide the country, as he promises to do if he gets elected. I know I don’t want to see it. A Second Civil War in the USA is what I envision under the administration of a possible President Trump. But the truth is that Hillary Clinton, a wealthy, hawkish politician, is not the cure for Mad Trump Disease. Only a healthy democracy can cure that, and at this stage, the USA is still far from being either healthy or a democracy in the truest sense of the words. The problem is the corrupt electoral system itself, and that’s what we have to deal with immediately.

Donald Trump fancies himself as another Richard Nixon, nostalgic for the law-and-order days of the Vietnam war of the 1960s. So, the Muskrat wants Nixon? We’ll give him the Nixon treatment, all right. We all know how Tricky Dick’s story turned out, and we can give Trump the same treatment if he becomes president and abuses his power and U.S. government policies. The people are not helpless, and we can take Trump on in the courthouses, in the court of public opinion, and yes, even in the streets if need be. The point is that we should not be afraid to deal with whichever of these two supremely lame candidates, Trump or Clinton, becomes U.S. president.

Vote your conscience on election day. Whichever way you decide to vote, it is time to reject the politics of fear that both political parties are bludgeoning us over the head with at the moment (with lots of help from the U.S. corporate-dominated news media). Inform yourself, get involved, vote — and then get down to serious work once the election is over on really upturning this dirty U.S. political system so that in 2020 and beyond, the politics of fear is removed from the U.S. national election process. The last thing we need is Trump and Clinton or any of their ilk reappearing before us again in four more years, with their greasy palms open, asking for more of our votes cast out of dread and fear.