So how does a first time voter decide?

Disclosure: US Citizen since November 2015. Resident in the US since 2005. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative. A member of the 1%. East Coast resident. Recipient of corporate healthcare. One child, graduated college.

Becoming a United States citizen was an active choice. I was a legal permanent resident for years and there was no financial or other imperative to convert my status. I made the decision because I felt obliged to participate in the democratic processes of the country that has become my home and to declare loyalty to that country.

Now, for the first time, I get to vote, to express my opinion on the direction of the country. It's fair to say that the choice is far from luxurious; for many traditionally committed the choice is not without reservation. We have two major party candidates both of whom give us good reason to be suspicious of their judgement and by consequence good reason to wonder how that judgement might effect our future.

So where to turn for advice? I know what my friends think but that does not help much as birds of a feather flock together and rarely let external views puncture our social echo chamber. The media has not helped much either. The opposing agendas of the New York Times and Fox News (to name but two) are transparently unbalanced at least to the extent of having no chance whatsoever of changing the perspective of a supporter of the other side. What's disturbing in the extreme is that their increasing focus on the 'villainy' of the candidate they oppose rather than the virtue of the one they support. The most ardent supporters have been reduced to apologists for the failings of their champions.

My adopted country, certainly in its political context appears to be post-truth, post-fact and post-compromise. This can't be a good thing and leaves me hanging by a thread to Churchill's axiom; "democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Many have already given up on the (possibly apocryphal) remark made by Washington to Jefferson that 'we pour our legislation into the Senatorial saucer to cool it.' Today it seems that the notion of cooling as a lubricant of collaboration for the greater good is all but redundant. As David Brooks of the New York Times has pointed out we are now in an era of 'anti-politics' as democratic political processes cannot function without compromise.

So, if counsel from without does not help, the only place to look is within. If the choices in the short term are compromised perhaps it's best to look at the long term. In the United States the long term is not shaped by the Executive and Legislative branches, it is shaped by the Judicial Branch ultimately by the Supreme Court.

If freedom mildly moderated by common sense is what you believe in above all it is essential that the next Judge (we have a vacancy the filling of which the Republican Caucus has refused to consider) is an appointee of a President who has a sense of the continued evolution of society in a global context and a sense of how our country can continue to call itself the land of the free, and the home of those brave enough to protect those freedoms for all who are created equal. The greatest enemy of freedom is prejudice; religious, race or gender.

By now it's clear how I am going to cast my vote. If it's not, the polarization of opinion is even greater than I feared.

I hope that if my preference is the one that prevails that our new President will use her vast experience and distance herself in thought and act from ambiguity and from interests that do not serve all Americans. Crucially she and those who support her must be acutely conscious that the country is divided, that the American dream is fractured and that to rebuild trust in America by Americans and trust of America by the rest of the world is an agenda that is not served by gloating victory but by magnaminity and compromise. Compromise is at the heart of politics, politics is at the heart of democracy and democracy truly is, for all its faults, better than the alternative.

God bless America, God bless all Americans and all the people who search for freedom, peace and equality. If my preference does not prevail I hope for exactly the same thing.