In 1964, Ronald Reagan burst upon the national political scene with his consequential speech about America's worrisome move away from traditional American governance that focuses on the individual and reveres traditional morality.  Americans nevertheless elected a Democrat who believed that smart government could right all wrongs.

That choice set America on the path to the 2020 election.  This time, the choice is no longer between bigger and smaller government.  Instead, Americans must choose between individual liberty under the Constitution and full-bore, totalitarian Marxism.

We chose wrong in 1964, but America's inherent strength gave us a 46-year grace period.  This time, however, we'd better get it right, for there are no do-overs.

Conrad Black has written a compelling article focusing readers on the gaping chasm that now exists between Democrats and conservatives.  Note that I do not say "between Democrats and Republicans."  Black explains that part of the breakdown in America today is that, beginning with George H.W. Bush,  Republicans elected to throw their weight in with the Democrats:

He [Bush, Sr.] was a dutiful vice president and competent president, but he never understood how or why Reagan had moved the Republican Party. 

When Bush sought reelection in 1992, he lost 20 million mainly Republican votes to the political charlatan Ross Perot, thereby bringing the Clintons down upon America. President Clinton moved the Democratic Party closer to the center, away from the nostrums of Jimmy Carter and George McGovern. And the Bush-McCain-Romney Republicans were almost Clintonian political look-alikes.

It was OBushinton government for seven terms and, on balance, it was a disaster. 

The  "OBushinton" world brought us one disaster after another, even as America managed to maintain a semblance of civil society: the Iraq War, the financial collapse of 2008 (flowing from Clinton's regulatory policies), open borders, North Korea's and Iran's growing nuclear power, etc.  As Black sums it up:

It was the most incompetent period of presidential government in American history, exceeding the decade prior to the Civil War and even the Prohibition, isolationism, and the crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. 

Distinctions became blurred between Republicans and Democrats, and the mediocre performance of the United States in the world and the failure of scores of millions of hard-working Americans to better their lot created the discontent in which Donald Trump was able to win control of the Republican Party by sweeping the primaries in 2016. 

As James Taranto once explained (and I'm paraphrasing here, because I can't find his original Wall Street Journal article), Republicans in Washington, D.C., docilely followed Democrats on almost all policies.  The only difference was that Republicans fretted about how to pay for those policies.

Donald Trump was the great disrupter in this OBushinton world.  He stood up to the Democrats and the OBushintons (whether the latter were politicians, pundits, or Deep Staters).  Their convulsive desire to cast out the man whose stated goal has been to destroy them and to return America to a more traditional form of constitutional governance created the fever conditions that gave birth to the so-called "Resistance" and then led to the madness of 2020.

You could say that the American political body has a plague and the deadly buboes of that plague are, first, the Democrat response to the Wuhan virus (lockdowns, the reflexive opposition to hydroxychloroquine, the mask wars) and, second, the George Floyd riots that quickly morphed from mourning to all-out civil war, with violence on the streets and a sustained attack on every institution in America.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Somalia) gave voice to this deadly political and cultural sickness on Tuesday when she announced that America's only hope lies in "dismantling" its "economy and political systems":

Rep. Ilhan Omar calls for "dismantling" of the U.S. "economy and political systems," which she calls a "system of oppression." pic.twitter.com/AP072GsmzW

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 7, 2020

To "dismantle" does not mean to "reform."  Instead, Omar is demanding that America "disassemble or pull down; take apart" an economy and liberty-oriented system of governance that has brought more people out of poverty and into freedom than any other system in the history of the world.  This is the death of a liberty-oriented government.

The oath Omar took upon entering the House of Representatives, the one that calls upon her to support the Constitution, means nothing to a woman steeped in Marxist Islamic doctrine.  But note well: Omar didn't walk into the House on her own.  Voters put her there, and the Democrat party considers her the voice of the future. 

For those voters bewildered or bemused by what's playing out before them — the willfully destroyed economy, the street riots that Democrat politicians and bureaucrats encourage, the media that has abandoned any function other than attacking Trump, the cancel culture that is infecting every aspect of American society, the speech codes imposed on us through big tech and our employers, and the elevation of a Nazi-style obsession with race — this is our time for choosing. 

Image: YouTube screen grab.