Fifty-two years ago this month, Ronald Reagan made a speech in which he said the following:

Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.  Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues.  They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men…. that we are to choose just between two personalities.

The two men referenced were Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, the 1964 candidates for president. Ronald Reagan titled his address “A Time for Choosing.” Now it might seem -- certainly to a number of very eminent Republicans it will seem -- that Donald Trump bears no comparison with Goldwater. None of the flamboyant moral turpitude exhibited by Trump was associated with the 1964 Republican nominee. And yet, Reagan thought it necessary to defend Goldwater in these terms:

Well, what of this man they [the Democrats] would destroy?  And in destroying [him], they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas you and I hold dear.  Is he the brash and shallow trigger-happy man they say he is?

Reagan goes on to praise Goldwater’s character, with examples from his life, weaving the defense of the candidate into one of conservative principle. This answered the Democrats’ vilification of Barry Goldwater as lunatic, racist, militarist, ignoramus, and cold-hearted, narrow reactionary.  The idea that whatever your party affiliation or political perspective, you could not countenance putting such a man in the White House was a theme of the Johnson campaign. And so Reagan defended him.

Again, it will be objected that no comparable defense of Trump’s character could be mounted without violence to the truth. But if the reader scrutinizes the quoted sentences from Reagan’s speech, it will be apparent that it was not solely, or even primarily, for the sake of a man named Barry Goldwater that he spoke that day. Indeed, by October 27, it was evident to Reagan and everyone else that Goldwater had no chance in the election. More than the election was at stake. The destruction of Goldwater by character assassination, not merely his defeat, would derail the movement to preserve constitutional liberty, which is American conservatism. And in doing so, it would presage the decline of the Republic.     

The election of 2016 also is not merely a choice between two personalities. Even Republicans who find Donald Trump as unsavory a character as Hillary Clinton must see what the triumph of the Democratic Party, led by her, will mean. The defamation and defeat of Barry Goldwater did not, in the event, curtail American democracy. It merely returned to power the Administration that then ushered in the catastrophes of Vietnam and the Great Society-War on Poverty. The American people remained the American people and the edifice of our constitutionalism endured, allowing the defeated Republican Party to come back. In October 2016, the issue of the election is still in doubt. But what will defeat at the polls this November signify, particularly if it involves control of one or both houses of Congress, as well as the presidency?

At the risk of committing apocalyptic rhetoric, we suggest a growing threat to the foundational essence of the nation: our constitutional system of ordered liberties and divided powers of government. Reagan’s alarm at freedom’s fragile condition in 1964 has an almost anachronistic quality. What will be left of liberty if eight years of Obama are followed by four or eight years of Clinton? Will we be hearing much from anyone skeptical of man-made climate change or of gay marriage? Will opposition to abortion and homosexuality be allowed in churches? How much more legislation by executive order and how many more treaties without ratification will occur, if the Republicans keep their congressional majorities? Or will such artifices even be necessary, as the transformation of the demography ushers in permanent Democratic control of all branches? Mrs. Clinton, we learn from WikiLeaks, dreams of replacing our sovereign nation with a hemispheric community, in which there are no borders. She certainly envisions dismantling the First Amendment, beginning with the repeal of the Citizens United case by a Supreme Court of her making, and the Second.

The moral imperative of electing Hillary Clinton President of the United States, nonetheless, has become apparent to a pantheon of most distinguished Republican opinion writers and scholars. If they do not actually vote for her, they will withhold support from Donald Trump and vote instead for a third-party candidate. In this way, one commentator explains, he will be able to look at himself in the mirror the next day. Operation Destroy the GOP’ Others are a little more polemical. We should have “sold our souls,” were we to support Donald Trump. Why we shouldn’t forgive the Republicans who sold their souls to Trump’s opponent is rarely mentioned, or if she is, praise is offered for her experience and level-headedness, and her “forward-looking” intellect. Forward-looking, she indubitably is: the America fashioned by the Framers must give way to a new one, with a somewhat less limited government, an attenuated devotion to individual liberty, and a different people, brought in en masse from Latin America and Africa.

We do not sell our souls who long only for the Republic to keep its own. Unless Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are stopped, what is most vital may be lost. The Constitution and the philosophy of natural right contained in the Declaration of Independence, which the Constitution as positive law effectuates, are the soul of America. (See Harvey Mansfield's America’s Constitutional Soul.) They are the bequest of the Founding Fathers, kept regnant in the land by Lincoln, and upheld by all who fought in all the wars of our history.

We happen upon a time for choosing more portentous and grim than 1964. What sacrifice is so great that we would not make it to retain our way of life and the Constitution on which it has always rested? Would we not, whatever disdain we feel for his personal morality or style of rhetoric, support the Republican candidate, who is the only alternative to Hillary Clinton? That candidate may be erratic, but he has said he will diminish taxes and regulations, secure the border, enforce the immigration laws, restore law and order generally, and make the country powerful in the world once more.  If he does not often speak of the Constitution, at least he reveals no ambition to rule in defiance of the separation of powers or to override people’s consciences by force of law. He will appoint judges who look to the constitutional text.

Will we not then put aside every vestige of solipsism and self-importance, recognizing that the future of the country is of greater moment than what anyone thinks of us individually, or the roles we envision for ourselves? And if we happen to be a well-known opinion writer and television talking head, worried about looking in a mirror, could we not desist from the practice for a few days? Surely, the mirror will still show someone bright, witty, and far above the passions of the vulgar when we look again.

No one who claims fealty to the cause of freedom, or to American “national greatness,” to recall a phrase, can acquiesce in the progress of the leftist juggernaut rolling over this country and now threatening to put the Clintons back in the White House. The country can continue to be “as a City upon a Hill,” in the words of John Winthrop that President Reagan loved to repeat. But there is no time for complacency or the indulgence of personal pique. The election of Donald Trump must be our business and our choice.