There are plenty of us who love what you stand for, and when I say “what you stand for,” I don’t mean baseball or Yellowstone or megachurches. I mean freedom. I mean the Constitution, the institutions it created, and the attitudes it fostered.

Oppressed nations used to dream of becoming like America. By this, they did not mean pickup trucks or Duck Dynasty. They meant personal autonomy, secure property rights, independent courts, a peaceful mechanism to evict their rulers, and laws that applied equally to everyone. The countries that escaped from fascism after 1945 and those that escaped from communism after 1990 consciously copied American institutions.

What are they supposed to think as they gaze at the gruesome choice before American voters now? One camp dismissed Puerto Rico as an island of garbage. The other applied the term to half the electorate. The campaign is a hideous grand guignol, with one candidate shouting babyish insults while the other struggles to get through a sentence without a teleprompt.

Both candidates would be unelectable if they were up against anyone else. Vice President Kamala Harris is what the Republicans falsely accused former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden of being: a far-Left activist who has signed up to the entire woke catechism, from excusing BLM rioters to promoting the hideous term “Latinx” and defending gender reassignment surgery for minors to calling the discovery and settlement of the Americas “shameful.”

Like Biden in 2020, Harris has tried to get through the election with as few interviews as possible, relying on whatever script is put before her, and you can see why. Her economic policies, from opposing fracking to wanting to keep paying everyone after lockdown, would be revolutionary. Whatever else was wrong with the Trump presidency, he did not pursue antigrowth policies. The same would not be true under Harris.

Harris, in short, is disqualified on almost every ground except one. If she loses, she will accept the verdict. Does anyone believe the same is true of Trump?

I have many other criticisms of Trump on the grounds of both policy and character. He favors the tariffs that exported and prolonged the Great Depression. He wants to edge away from Ukraine, which handed away its nuclear weapons in 1994 after the United States promised to guarantee its independence. He refuses to distinguish between his personal interests and his public office. His followers, taking their cue from him, have given up on any remnant of limited-government Reaganism and want to use state power to reward their friends and punish their enemies. His whiny hypersensitivity makes him run foreign policy on the basis of whether overseas leaders flatter him personally.

None of this would matter so much if he did not threaten democracy. Yes, threaten. What else can you call it when a candidate, before a single ballot has been cast, said he cannot lose other than through fraud? Or when the same candidate urged his followers to overturn an election result? Don’t give me any nonsense about how Jan. 6 was a high-spirited jaunt by a few eccentrics that has been hyped up by the Left. If there was truly no intent to overturn the election, why the animus, both from Trump and from MAGA more widely, against former Vice President Mike Pence?

That, in the end, is what makes us pro-Americans want to weep. Instead of the rest of the world adopting our norms, America is moving the other way, with elections followed by demands that the losing candidate be jailed.

One candidate thinks the very existence of her country is shameful, while the other candidate threatens its constitution. Sheesh, what a choice.

I started writing this column shortly before the 2016 election. I could not bring myself to support either candidate at the time and eventually wrote that if I had a vote, I would cast it for the Libertarian candidate, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. In 2020, well aware (as most people were) of Biden’s cognitive decline, I again could not bring myself to back either candidate.

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I had hoped that those two elections were a blip. I was wrong. Indeed, this time, things are materially worse. Harris, without the excuse of senescence, struggles to get through interviews more than Biden, and whereas Biden was never the socialist that his opponents claimed, she really is. Meanwhile, Trump has replaced all the Republicans who sought to constrain his unconstitutional behavior.

Either way, I sense the America that I have loved all my life slipping away.