This is a #NeverHillary appeal to the #NeverTrump people. I’m assuming the reader strongly dislikes Donald Trump. If you’re pro-Trump, there isn’t much for you in what follows, unless you’re looking for something to say to the NeverTrump people in your life.

Also, what follows will sound rather cynical. This is a cynical time. Politics is at its best when idealistic people cast cynical ballots. America is choking to death on decades of emotional manipulation.

So: if you’re a voter who doesn’t like either of the major-party options in 2016, my advice is to avoid electing the one who will never, ever be held accountable for her actions.

This has been proven time and again about Hillary Clinton. Her entire career, and that of her husband, are tributes to corruption, the triumph of raw politics over the rule of law. Corruption isn’t just about money changing hands. More fundamentally, it’s about the exercise of power without the restraint of law. #NeverHillary is an uncompromising stance against systemic corruption.

Clinton-style pay-for-play is just one grubby manifestation of the corruption that riddles Democrat-dominated government – and make no mistake, it’s been Democrat-dominated for a very long time. The process of government expansion and corruption, the accumulation of special favors for the Party and its friends, greatly accelerated during the Obama years, but that political machine was hardly sitting at idle when Barack Obama slammed his foot on the gas pedal.

I will offer no illusions about Donald Trump — or, for that matter, any of the Republicans he ran against — as an invincible corruption-fighter. But I will say this: no matter what you think of his policy positions, he will have significant opposition, because he is a Republican.

If you let Hillary Clinton get into the Oval Office, the full power of a corrupt system –– including the media, whose corruption was laid bare by #DNCLeak, and the gigantic unelected bureaucracy that has largely displaced Congress as the source of legislative power — will be at her beck and call. Every ounce of that system’s power will be bent toward destroying anyone who opposes her agenda, or tries to hold her accountable.

There is no scenario in which Trump would enjoy that level of immunity from consequence — not even if, as some Trump skeptics allege, his agenda was very similar to Clinton’s. At a bare minimum, the media organs of the Leviathan State will hate him personally, and will never stop trying to whip up hatred against him. (Try reading almost any article, on any non-political subject, at any Left-leaning website, and see how far you get before the first cheap shot at Trump.)

The Democrat Party, which is vastly more powerful and organized than the GOP at the present time, will never stop trying to take Trump down, no matter how hard he tries to reach across the aisle. Ask George W. Bush about that. If nothing else, they’ll want to create political opportunities for themselves by assaulting the Republican President and thwarting his policy proposals… even if they’re proposals that would seem agreeable to Democrats.

#NeverHillary, because some resistance to unitary executive power is better than none. (I warned you this would be a cynical essay!)

There have been suggestions that Clinton would be easier for movement-conservative Republicans to oppose than Trump, since he’s in the party. That’s absolute nonsense. It accepts the premise that voters are 100 percent responsible for every single thing a presidential candidate does in office, which is a left-wing totalitarian idea.

On a practical scale, anyone who thinks Donald Trump would be more difficult for anyone to oppose in office than Hillary Clinton has simply lost touch with reality. Refer to what I said above about the full power of the corrupt system standing behind her. Opposition to Trump will be actively encouraged by that system, especially for disgruntled Republicans. The media will dangle rich prizes before any prominent Republican who wants to spend a few years attacking him.

Already, we’ve seen the amazing spectacle of totalitarian Democrats rediscovering separation of powers, limits on executive authority, the rights of political minorities, and the value of political speech as they merely contemplate the possibility of a President Trump. I assure you, they will completely forget about all of these things if Hillary Clinton wins in November.

It’s not a joke to say that Democrats are rediscovering the Constitution because Trump might win. It’s vitally necessary for the future of the Republic. America will not endure if half the population is willing to sacrifice our core principles in the pursuit of power and government largesse. They must be taught to respect the Constitution, and at the present time, there is simply no way to do that, other than putting a Republican in the White House. A Republican they viscerally hate might even be the most effective teacher possible.

NeverTrump pundits seem to think Clinton might just be a disagreeable and inept President they could manage for four years, then clobber with a great candidate in 2020. Again, they have lost touch with reality. Clinton will continue what Obama has done, and really what Democrats have done for decades, with every scrap of power they obtain: she’ll modify the electorate to make Republican victory impossible.

Democrats take every opportunity to implement policies that change the electorate through social engineering, by increasing government dependency, exacerbating class and racial tensions, sowing doubt about the value of economic freedom, and, of course, importing voters more agreeable to their philosophy. Clinton will do all of these things with gusto.

Democrats believe they are very close to arranging permanent executive power through social engineering. That’s one of the reasons they’ve been working so hard to unbalance the separation of powers, making the executive and judiciary – which the executive controls through appointments, or at least it does when Democrats are in power – supreme at the expense of an increasingly irrelevant Congress.

Notice how liberals didn’t bat an eye, when conservatives warned that Obama’s new executive super-powers might one day be wielded by a Republican. They simply don’t think that’s going to be a danger for much longer, they believe the Administrative State they have created will automatically resist the use of executive power against Big Government, and they know few Republicans have any appetite for social engineering.

#NeverHillary is the only way to pump the brakes on the Transformation of America.

Short-sightedness is the curse of Republican politics, which is one reason GOP leaders have a knack for turning every bold move into a disaster, after which they flagellate their own Party and voters to appease the media. Republican leadership is worried about tomorrow’s headlines, next weekend’s talking-head shows, and maybe a few congressional races in the next election.

Democrats do things like inflict ObamaCare on the nation, at the cost of many congressional seats, because they know it will re-shape the electorate for decades to come. They also know their media can help them limit the political fallout — there is no one in America so callously ignored as the victim of ObamaCare, or the victim of illegal alien crime.

Big-picture: you can’t put an ambitious politician with that kind of power in the Oval Office, and think you have a chance of repairing the damage in four years. Whatever damage a NeverTrump stalwart thinks Trump might do to the GOP, you are severely underestimating Hillary Clinton and her Party if you don’t understand that she’ll do worse, just as the Republicans who stayed home in 2008 and 2012 underestimated Obama.

Do you seriously think any of the Republicans who ran in 2016 could have repaired the damage to America inflicted by Obama, even with two terms and a Republican Congress? Let us understand what the people who sat out 2008 and 2012 threw away, before we decide to sit out 2016.

Think about national security, too. Clinton isn’t just willfully blind to the threats facing America — she’ll actively make them worse. Her ideology and Party discipline will never allow her to admit Obama made crucial mistakes. Benghazi and its aftermath showed us what she’ll do, and what she can get away with, to cover her own. Democrat dogma calls for numerous steps that will weaken American military power, border security, and law enforcement.

Even if you think Trump isn’t as good on those counts as he claims to be, you have to admit he at least has some idea of who the enemy is, and is willing to speak its name. He doesn’t seem interested in actively weakening national security and law enforcement, as Obama did, and Clinton surely will. He won’t have a media apparatus working to conceal threats to American security, because they make him look bad. His foreign policy agenda will be opposed, no matter what it is.

Trump will never be able to turn puppet reporters into “force multipliers” for his agenda, the way Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes boasted of doing. (To be brutally frank, reporters will still be as lazy as Rhodes found them, and a Republican Administration can take advantage of that lassitude, but no Republican will ever get the kind of willing assistance with spreading false narratives that Obama did.)

I’ll rest my #NeverHillary case without making any “NeverTrump means you’re working for Clinton!” cracks. I don’t like the “not voting for candidate X = supporting candidate Y” formulation. It reminds me of the creepy idea for “mandatory voting” the Left floats occasionally. Nobody should be forced to vote, or shamed into voting. The effort to make voting so easy, and insecure, that even people who don’t give a damn – or shouldn’t be legally able to vote – can participate will take us nowhere good.

But in a binary political system, there is a tough choice to be made. Sadly, voting for principled, anti-corruption third parties tends to empower the corrupt incumbents, because it bleeds away opposition they might otherwise have to worry about. Replacing one of the Big Two with a viable new party will take time America probably doesn’t have – refer to the social engineering point above.

And when one party has as many institutional advantages as Democrats do today, as much unelected bureaucratic and media power behind them, staying home does tend to favor them. They’re almost at the end of a hundred-year project to erase the constitutional Republic and replace it with something very different. Passive resistance is as ineffective as an unarmed man challenging a gunman to a debate. In case you haven’t noticed, even the right to argue with the Left is under active assault, and staying home doesn’t protect you from their voracious agenda. They’ll come to you.

Bottom line: before you shake your head and grumble about choosing the lesser of two evils, be sure you understand what the greater evil has in mind, and how many more “wins” it needs before the game is lost.