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By all the standard measures, my politics are vigorously progressive. I despise the two-party system and am a registered Green Party member. I have pushed hard for affirmative action, an end to corporate welfare, reparations for African-Americans, and aggressive remedies for the growing income gap between rich and poor. Though I inhabit the body of a hetero dude, I am a staunch feminist and have lobbied loudly for gay rights. I oppose economic globalization and am a big fan of the Ruckus Society, which teaches demonstrators how to disrupt WTO conventions. I regard the corporate abuse of our environment as a terrorist crime and I give money to Greenpeace and the Earth Island Institute. I support strong gun-control measures, a reduced military, radical campaign finance reform, an end to the ridiculous war on drugs, and a national health care system that ensures every American has a safety net.

But I'm voting for Al Gore, not Ralph Nader.

Yes, I'm motivated in part by a fear of George W. Bush. His presidency would be a catastrophe from which it would take years to recover. But I also support Gore because the goals I described above are more likely to be served in the long run by a vote for him, not a vote for Nader.

I'm a pragmatist. From the time I first entered the ranks of leftist bohemian feminist eco-freaks more than two decades ago, I've noticed that our tribe has not exactly grown to mammoth proportions. This year we're aiming, with Ralph's leadership, to prove that one out of every 20 voters agrees with us. During four years of a Bush presidency, environmental disasters would no doubt proliferate on such a horrifying scale that scores of converts would come flocking to our side, swelling our numbers to perhaps (in my dreams!) 10 percent of the population.

But it just ain't gonna happen that one of our kind gets elected president -- not in 2008, not any time -- unless there's what we used to call in my anarchist youth a "revolution," in which case maybe we leftist bohemian feminist eco-freaks will take over Northern California, secede from the United States, and vote whomever the hell we want as Prime Minister. (Please, Goddess, let our revolution install a parliamentary system in its new government so we don't have two-party gridlock.)

I suppose there is one tiny glimmer of hope that a person like Ralph Nader might be elected president by, say, 2012. Paradise could conceivably come about if a few of the other minority tribes started signing up with our team. Unfortunately, there are no signs that's remotely imminent.

Read and weep as Eric Alterman describes the sorry truth in one of America's pre-eminent leftist mags, "The Nation." There, Alterman argues that Nader's "nascent leftist movement has virtually no support among African-Americans, Latinos or Asian-Americans. It has no support among organized feminist groups,organized gay rights groups or mainstream environmental groups. To top it all off, it has no support in the national union movement. So Nader and company are building a nonblack, non-Latino, non-Asian, nonfeminist, nonenvironmentalist, nongay, non-working people's left: Now that really would be quite an achievement."

Ouch.

I wish I could in good conscience vote for Ralph Nader. I share most of his views. He is the choice of many of my fellow leftist bohemian feminist eco-freaks, and they would love me better and think I was cooler if I voted as they will.

But I recognize that I live in a world full of people who don't think or act like me. If I want my political goals to have a chance at making headway, I can't afford to be an uncompromising purist. I am, above all, allergic to inflexible moral fundamentalism -- whether it resides in people whose values I abhor, like rightwing Christians, or in people whose values I adore.

Gore is by no means the leader of my dreams, but he's the only one who might possibly become president and actually take practical measures to help the poor, protect the environment, preserve reproductive rights, ensure universal health care coverage, and fight bigotry.