Every four years, we hear a refrain that the presidential election before us is the “most important election of our lifetimes.” This line is reflexively repeated by pundits, talkers and thinkers on both sides of the American political divide, and that repetition always engenders a great deal of backlash. We are reliably informed that our elaborate Constitution, with its intricate checks and balances and federalist system of dual spheres of sovereignty, can withstand any particular president (and Congress). Bills are very hard to pass out of Congress, you see, and rogue presidents can be reined in by the Supreme Court. Didn’t you know that gridlock in Washington is a feature, not a bug? Don’t you remember watching “Schoolhouse Rock!”? Come on!

I dissent from this blithe dismissal of very real concern. Tuesday’s presidential contest, between former President Donald Trump and sitting Vice President Kamala Harris, is the most important election of our lifetimes. There are two reasons for this: one structural and one contextual. They are both important.

First, structure. There is a concept in traditional Jewish thought called yeridat hadorot, or “the decline of the generations.” The basic idea is that, because each successive generation is necessarily further away than the generations that preceded it from God’s Revelation to Moses at Mount Sinai, each new generation is less reliable than its predecessors when it comes to Torah knowledge, divine inspiration and perhaps general wisdom. We can draw an easy analogy here to the American republic. With the exception of some truly epochal figures, such as Abraham Lincoln, subsequent generations of American leadership that are further removed from the Constitutional Convention of 1787 have been less reliable when it comes to safeguarding core American values. We see this clearly, for instance, in the early 20th-century rise of the modern administrative state.

From this perspective, every new presidential election is the most important one of our lifetimes. By definition, we are always getting further and further away from the American founding, and closer and closer to the point of no return (if we have not already crossed it).

This Tuesday’s particular presidential election is also the most important election of our lifetimes.

Ultimately, the 2024 election presents us with the opportunity to pick a definitive side in America’s roiling cold civil war, which this column has often phrased as that between the forces of civilizational sanity and the forces of civilizational arson.

It is not an exaggeration to say that our constitutional structure, biblical inheritance and middle-class economy are all on the ballot this Tuesday.