On the eve of the 2008 US Presidential election, I find myself filled with dread. It’s a somewhat familiar feeling. In 2000, the feeling of anxiously hoping my candidate would win turned into weeks of stomach-churning dread as the American democratic experiment began its descent into history. In 2004, hope began dissolving into dread as the “too close to call” states began flipping on their exit polls as election night wore on.

But this year is different. This year should have been the light at the end of a long, miserable tunnel. Instead, it has revealed that we are much farther gone than I had feared. And so on the eve of the election, I dread what my fellow Americans are going to do tomorrow; not just the voters, but the corrupters of the process: the lying media, the vote suppressors, the exit poll twisters, the hate mongers, the “anything to win” forces. Once upon a time, there was a line in the sand that “my side” did not cross. Once upon a time, the corrupters of the process would have belonged clearly on the other side of that line. This time, the line has been deliberately blurred.

What disturbs me is how accepting of this corruption so many have become. Some simply refuse to see it when it’s right in front of them; others bury their heads in the sand, believing that if they don’t know what’s going on, nothing bad can be happening; but some see it and welcome it, as if the corrupting forces of less-than-democratic elections can be used for the greater good. Many times over the past eight years, I heard people say, “We need to get smart and beat them at their own game. We need to play dirty.” I naively hoped this was the voice of a few bitter and misguided individuals, but the events of the past several months have shown that it was the moving force behind the New Left, a movement that was emboldened by its early success in the netroots with such an unlikely “progressive” tool as misogyny.

It was so easy, so eagerly embraced by so many, that it’s frightening. And its post-convention embrace by so many feminists as a bludgeon against Sarah Palin is bitterly stunning. The same women that decried what was being used against Hillary Clinton and her supporters in the primaries threw themselves wholeheartedly into vicious anti-woman rants all in the name of hating a woman on “the wrong side” (though to be fair, some of them, like Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL, jumped the shark a bit earlier). And when some women objected to this behavior, we got comments like this one, which epitomizes the entire past 11 months for me, though it is by no means the most offensive:

They need to pop a Midol and stop bitchin’. Show me the “extreme misogyny” and “pro-Obama sexism”.

If it were only the use of misogyny to win a primary, it would be bad enough. But the insults to the will of the voters—the decision of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee on May 31, 2008 to award the votes of uncommitted voters in Michigan to Obama, and to strip another four delegates away from Hillary Clinton to clinch the deal; the farce of a roll-call vote at the convention—ought to have disturbed even those completely inured to the sexism. Yet it was met with a yawn, and more than a fair amount of “Who cares how he got the nomination? As long as we win!”

If we don’t care how a nominee wins his party’s nomination, why should we care how a candidate wins the presidency? Why should we care that the last two presidential elections in this country were highly irregular? Shouldn’t George Bush have been congratulated for his clever strategy? Why should we even have an election? After all, the people of this nation, as we’ve been told repeatedly for the past several months, are too stupid and racist to be trusted with this sacred duty. Let’s just skip all this nonsense and send out an RFP. Let the top bidder win. (But wait, that’s what happens anyway, isn’t it?)

So what happens tomorrow…will it be legitimate? Will it matter if it’s not? I feel as if I’m standing on the edge of history—not the historical moment of white America expiating its sins against people of color by electing the first Black president, but the last stand for this democracy. No matter what happens tomorrow, I’m not sure I’ll be able to look my fellow Americans in the eye for fear of what I’ll see there. I think we’ve gone too far to come back. And I wonder now if I did enough to stand against the corruption.

So many other voices were speaking out that I thought mine wouldn’t matter. I thought taking a personal stand would be enough—my vote, my conscience. I’m not going to be able to change anyone’s mind here in San Francisco, I thought. I’m not going to be able to convince anyone of the corruption of the primary process if they couldn’t see it with their own eyes. I couldn’t even convince most of them to protest with me against the fraud in Ohio in “aught four.” I wonder what kind of comfort that’s going to be when things begin to unravel? Like Holly Hunter’s character in Broadcast News in answer to the sarcastic, “It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room,” I have to answer, “No. It’s awful.”

And like Heidi Li of the Denver Group, I’m more than a little sad.