Every four years, we hear a refrain that the presidential election before us is the “most important election of our lifetimes.” This line is reflexively repeated by pundits, talkers and thinkers on both sides of the American political divide, and that repetition always engenders a great deal of backlash. We are reliably informed that our elaborate Constitution, with its intricate checks and balances and federalist system of dual spheres of sovereignty, can withstand any particular president (and Congress). Bills are very hard to pass out of Congress, you see, and rogue presidents can be reined in by the Supreme Court. Didn’t you know that gridlock in Washington is a feature, not a bug? Don’t you remember watching “Schoolhouse Rock!”? Come on!

I dissent from this blithe dismissal of very real concern. Tuesday’s presidential contest, between former President Donald Trump and sitting Vice President Kamala Harris, is the most important election of our lifetimes. There are two reasons for this: one structural and one contextual. They are both important.

First, structure. There is a concept in traditional Jewish thought called yeridat hadorot, or “the decline of the generations.” The basic idea is that, because each successive generation is necessarily further away than the generations that preceded it from God’s Revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai, each new generation is less reliable than its predecessors when it comes to Torah knowledge, divine inspiration and perhaps general wisdom. We can draw an easy analogy here to the American republic. With the exception of some truly epochal figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, subsequent generations of American leadership that are further removed from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 have been less reliable when it comes to safeguarding core American values. We see this clearly, for instance, in the early 20th-century rise of the modern administrative state.

From this perspective, every new presidential election is the most important one of our lifetimes. By definition, we are always getting further and further away from the American founding, and closer and closer to the point of no return (if we have not already crossed it).

This Tuesday’s particular presidential election is also the most important election of our lifetimes for a simple additional reason: Harris is the most ideologically left-wing, intellectually deficient and wildly unprepared presidential candidate in the nation’s history.

An America under (God forbid) President Harris is an America besieged with so many illegal alien criminals and foreign terrorists so as to make the last four already-horrific years look positively paradisical. An America under (God forbid) President Harris is one where American manufacturing continues to deteriorate, stifling electrical vehicle mandates destroy the American auto industry, oil and natural gas restrictions lead to skyrocketing energy prices, and mass spending once again brings crippling inflation. An America under (God forbid) President Harris is one where the Supreme Court is packed, the lower courts are stacked with radical Constitution-hating progressives, and the Department of Justice is weaponized like never before against Democrats’ political enemies. An America under (God forbid) President Harris is one where Iran gets the bomb, jihadism is emboldened both at home and abroad, China invades Taiwan and makes ever-greater inroads in our own hemisphere, and Israel is as diplomatically and militarily isolated as it has ever been.

Are you paying attention yet?

This is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party. Once upon a time, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court, his fellow Democrats who dominated the Senate Judiciary Committee had the common sense and decency to rise up en masse and say, “No.” But today, a President Harris would have supine leftist zealots, such as Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), eager to do the bidding of their dear White House leader. Once upon a time, Democratic former President Bill Clinton signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and vowed that abortion would be “safe, legal and rare.” Today, Harris says she will brook no compromise on religious exemptions for the fundamental “right” of snuffing out an unborn life in the womb, and she promises to codify that “right” from conception right up until birth nationwide.

I repeat: Are you paying attention yet?

Ultimately, the 2024 election presents us with the opportunity to pick a definitive side in America’s roiling cold civil war, which this column has often phrased as that between the forces of civilizational sanity and the forces of civilizational arson. Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) represent the former: They are the ticket, above all, of normalcy. Harris and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), by contrast, embody the latter: They are the ticket, above all, of decadence. It is not an exaggeration to say that our constitutional structure, biblical inheritance and middle-class economy are all on the ballot this Tuesday.

Here’s hoping team sanity prevails over the arsonists.

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