Don’t be confused about Nov 5.

There is confusion as to what is on the ballot on November 5. Note that I said, “what,” and not, “who.”

That’s because it’s really not about “who.”

Boiled all the way down, this is not a contest between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump. It’s not even a contest between two political parties. And it goes well beyond such things as tax policy, fiscal policy and national defense.

The 2024 election is a contest between two governing visions for this 235-year-old republic – two governing visions that have seldom in our history been more divergent.

On the one hand, you have the governing vision that animated the Founding Fathers. That vision is one of a government that is tightly circumscribed. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was at times highly contentious. The Founders at various times during that sweltering summer in Philadelphia argued bitterly. But the arguments sprang from a commonly held conviction. The Founders were unanimous in their belief that government by its very nature tends toward tyranny and that government is, therefore, no better than a necessary evil.

Our founding documents – the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – were both written by men who understood that when humans are given power over other humans, that power will be abused. So, they sought to give government only the bare minimum power necessary to defend the peace, support the currency and act as an impartial referee in the conduct of commerce.

Our founding documents fairly scream with distrust of concentrated power. The three co-equal branches of our federal government about which you and I learned in high school but about which a distressing number of college students know little today, exist for the express purpose of limiting each other and thereby limiting the reach and power of government.

Our Founders – who suffered the tyrannies large and small of a far-away King George III – sought to push government downward and away from centralization. It is easier to hold to account a locally elected constable or alderman that it is to hold to account a far-off potentate.

That concern about a potentate is why, when you read your Constitutional history, you find that the Founders struggled more with Article II of the Constitution – the presidency – than they did with any of the six other articles.

The grand vision of our Founders – as it is embodied in our Constitution – is that the federal government should have only a small impact on daily life. Their vision was that free citizens of sovereign states would be at maximum liberty to order their lives and arrange their affairs as they, themselves, believed to be best.

The Founders also believed that with respect to the power of government, the closer to home it is kept the easier it is to keep that power in check. That belief animated every discussion that involved any surrender of rights by the 13 original individual states.

That’s the vision in which I believe and it’s the vision that animates small-government Republicans. It is the vision that led President Trump in his first term to aggressively eliminate regulations that have piled up over decades of the federal government being allowed to grow beyond the bounds of the original intent of the framers of the Constitution.

That’s one side of the ballot.

The other side of the ballot, the one embraced by a rapidly increasing proportion of Democrats, seeks to bring about the perfection of society via top-down control. It’s a governing vision in which a relatively small cabal of elite and enlightened “experts” exercises extensive control over the daily lives of less enlightened citizens via the mechanisms of extensive legislation and regulation overseen by a sprawling federal bureaucracy.

That governing vision has the federal government dictating for our own good how, when and from whom we obtain our health care. It has the government dictating how many and what kind of vehicles we may drive and where we may drive them. It has the government possessed of the capacity to set our thermostats from afar to control our use of energy in our homes.

Speaking of homes, it is the ultimate vision of many big-government progressives that we abandon the conceit of individual ownership of spacious homes on spacious lots of our own choosing. Instead, we are to adopt collectivist living in concentrated government-planned and managed housing located close to city centers.

By concentrating us in close, government-overseen housing, we might more easily be coerced out of our private vehicles. Statist progressives want us walking to work, walking to the store, and walking our kids to school. Where walking isn’t practical, we are to use public transit. All this so that our use of private vehicles might be reduced or outright eliminated.

The governing vision of far-left progressives is that the federal government will have power over us down to what and how much we eat. An example of this can already be seen in the progressive-led jihad on beef and cattle ranching that has been underway for years.

Total control of public education is at the very heart of the leftist governing vision. Government as envisioned by the statists on the left will dictate to us what our children may be taught in the schools that we pay for and, equally important, what may not be taught in those schools. Parental input regarding the education of children will be neither sought nor suffered. In the perfect world of big-government progressives, private education will be done away with altogether so that the government might have ultimate control of what our children are taught and what they grow up believing.

This governing vision of education dovetails into a statist belief that rather than having the primary say as to how we raise our children, we should instead be de facto agents of the government in that endeavor.

These are the governing visions of the other side of the ballot.

Which means that rather than just choosing between two candidates, we are instead at an inflection point in our political history.

Not in yours and my lifetimes have the two parties been more divergent in what they believe and what they intend to do if elected.

For most of my life, Democrats and Republicans have largely agreed on the big things. We have largely agreed on our basic freedoms. We have largely agreed that America is basically good. We have largely agreed that the best way to raise children is in a household containing a man and a woman with a lifetime commitment to one another via marriage.

We have largely agreed that the government should stay out of our business.

We have largely agreed on the need for a strong, vibrant and capable military with a primary mission of deterring the ambitions of bad guys around the world.

We have largely agreed that men and women as created by God are fundamentally different and that those differences are intended by God to complement one another.

For most of our lives, Democrats and Republicans may have disagreed as to the what the preacher was trying to say in the sermon, but they nevertheless all sang from the same hymnal.

That is now coming undone.

Kamala Harris is the product of a Democratic Party that has gone far, far to the left. To understand what that means in practical terms, you need only look at the physical, spiritual and moral breakdown in major American cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis and others under their current Democratic Party leaders.

So, this election season, don’t be confused even as people try to confuse you.

You’re not choosing between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Each of them is merely a proxy. The real contest is between the original vision of the drafters of our Constitution; and a vision of our nation as informed by the writings and beliefs of the likes of Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky.

So, don’t get hung up on Kamala Harris’s idiotic ramblings or her stupid cackle. Don’t get hung up on Donald Trump’s “mean tweets” and verbal wild pitches.

It’s about choosing between the country of freedom and individual liberty that we inherited from our parents and grandparents, or a country administered by a small group of elites exercising top-down control over every aspect of our lives.

It’s certainly not about how either candidate makes you “feel.”