To the editor:

What “makes America great?” This question is, at bottom, the crucial issue in the upcoming presidential election, and it needs to be made clear. The traditional political parties — Republican and Democrat alike — have agreed that the greatness of America lies in the fact that it is a system of self-government — a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

This system of self-government operates only through the various democratic institutions as laid down in the Constitution, and it requires that its citizens undertake the responsibility — an arduous responsibility — to sustain and nurture those institutions.

What its citizens cannot do, therefore, is to shirk that responsibility and hand it over to an authoritarian figure, especially one who has no loyalty to those institutions. MAGA Republicans are deeply mistaken if they really believe that what has made America great is identical to what Donald Trump wants, for by supporting him they in effect give up on governing themselves.

What the citizens of this country are voting for, between the two major candidates in the upcoming election, is whether they prefer to govern themselves or not. The Democratic candidate who runs against Trump must continue to remind the people that America’s greatness rests, as it always has, on its vision of the freedom of its people — people who govern themselves and who would never relinquish that responsibility to a would-be despot.

Michael Hinz,

Lawrence