What became known as “The Speech” took place 60 years ago this week.

The Speech was on behalf of a major-party-American-presidential candidate shortly before Election Day.

Years later, the candidate recalled that supporters had proposed he give The Speech himself.

The candidate, however, said it didn’t sound like him, so it wasn’t a speech for him to give. Instead, he suggested supporters get someone more “professionally trained.”

So they recruited a speaker.

Although the candidate didn’t win the presidency, the speaker later did.

The speaker’s conclusion included these words: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”

The speaker didn’t imply then–nor does this column imply now–that a single loss in a single presidential election would lead to the proverbial “thousand years of darkness.”

Over time, though, ordered liberty can erode. Each generation must defend it and pass it on to the next.

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In 2024, Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris stands in the 1968 shoes of Hubert Humphrey: As vice president in an unpopular administration, she stepped in as the presidential candidate when she–not many months before the general election–hadn’t known for sure that she’d be at the top of the ticket.

Humphrey, though, had a crucial advantage over Harris. He was a stellar candidate who acquitted himself well and gave no one serious cause to think he was in over his head.

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So contemptuous of 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s supporters are Harris’s boss, Joe Biden; Harris herself; and Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, that Biden on Oct. 29 called Trump supporters “garbage,” while Harris and Walz in late October joined Hillary Clinton in comparing the Oct. 27 Trump rally in New York City’s Madison Square Garden to a 1930s rally of national socialists in the same venue.

More on national socialists below. For now, please recall this is part of the pattern in which 2016 Democrat presidential candidate Clinton called Trump supporters deplorable and irredeemable.

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The 2024 election is about way more than that.

Among the issues is Biden and Harris’s record, including:

�–� Spurning inflation partly by constraining energy production.

�–� Letting millions of illegal aliens–including criminals and terrorists–into the country, some with illegal drugs. Harris has advocated not treating illegal entry even as a crime. What has happened, however, has been more than a crime. It has been an invasion that Biden and border czar Harris, instead of stopping, have encouraged and welcomed, thereby unleashing chaos in some places–more on chaos below–and undermining the national security of the United States.

�–� Appointing to the federal bench many judicial activists, one of whom was unable during confirmation hearings to define the word woman. Why? “I’m not a biologist,” the nominee said. However, one needn’t be a biologist to know what a woman is, any more than one need be a lawyer to know (1) judicial activism is wrong, or be a coach to know it’s wrong to let people with XY chromosomes (2) play on teams with women or girls or (3) share locker rooms with women or girls.

�–� Proposing Education Department regulations requiring (2) and permitting (3).

�–� Leaving billions of dollars in American-military assets and American-military equipment in the hands of enemies of the United States.

�–� Reinvigorating a nemesis of America in a dangerous neighborhood in the world, and

�–� Otherwise projecting weakness.

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Over the long term, even more is at stake.

How long can the United States endure policies such as Biden and Harris’s?

Please remember this: Many in Biden and Harris’s inner circle don’t understand, much less believe in, American exceptionalism. They don’t want the United States to endure as “this, the last best hope of man on earth.”

At best, they’re mistaken. America continues, in Ronald Reagan’s words in The Speech, to “have a rendezvous with destiny.” We can and we must prevail. We can and we must “preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth.”

This is no easy task. It’s hard work.

The mother in this columnist’s German exchange family, having started school in 1933 and graduated in 1945–think about those years in German history–learned from a young age, and often rightly spoke of, just how quickly ordered liberty, if not successfully defended, can collapse, even in an advanced Western country, and fall to socialist atheist totalitarianism.

Please remember this too: National socialists, who rose to power first in Germany, are similar to, not opposites of, international socialists, who rose to power first in Russia. In short, both are socialist atheist totalitarians.

Some on both sides of the Atlantic overlook that reality, partly because statists–including Clinton, Biden, Harris, and Walz–perpetuate their self-serving falsehood that national socialists are extreme versions of nonstatists, such as Western conservatives. Instead, national socialists–like international socialists–are extreme versions of statists. Nonstatists can’t, by becoming more nonstatist, become fascist any more than skinny people, by losing weight, can become obese.

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Speaking on the ellipse in Washington on Oct. 29, Harris said this election is a choice between freedom and chaos.

In the short term, and even more importantly in the long term, Harris is right for reasons she doesn’t mention.

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For more on the 2024 presidential election, see the interview of Dr. Randy Elf at 0:15.10 to 0:17.10 of https://works.bepress.com/elf/310

COPYRIGHT © 2024 BY RANDY ELF