What Republicans ask you to consider this election season

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One hundred sixty-three years ago this past April, the Civil War began. It was fought to preserve the Union. The men from every Northern state understood that the Democrats’ unrelenting support of slavery and the slaveocracy was the reason the nation divided and the reason the nation’s future was at risk.

Then, as now, Minnesota Republicans understood that our nation could not continue with half the country believing that some men were destined to rule and others to be ruled. The Democrats claimed that slavery was not a moral issue but a positive good. Minnesota volunteers rushed toward the gunfire and turned the tide in many battles in the preservation of the Union and destruction of slavery. The men who fought to preserve the Union understood that a nation is much more than a collection of people who happen to reside inside a geographical boundary thrown together by fate.

Rather, a nation is a people who share commonalities. Fundamental commonalities — a shared language, a shared culture, a shared history. Today, Democrats tell us that the effort to preserve these commonalities is racist, bigoted, harmful, and that it must be rejected. For Democrats to maintain power, they are required to divide the American people. They are required to insist that our strength exists in creating separate enclaves. Democrats insist that women cannot be represented by men, atheists cannot be represented by believers, people of one race cannot represent people of another. This is the core organizing principle of their party. They have been determined to prove there is nothing we have in common other than shared geography.

The Declaration of Independence spells out clearly that the things we as human beings have in common are more important than the things that make us all unique. The Democrats explicitly reject this founding American idea. The founders pledged their very lives to the principle that this human nature is true and unchanging. Today, Democrats cannot even agree on what a human being is, nor can they agree that there are men and women.

Who are we as a people? As a nation? On Nov. 5, we will be asked to decide which of these contrasting views is right.

In accepting the nomination to be the Republican candidate for vice president, U.S. Sen. JD Vance made it clear that preserving our nation is fundamental. The Biden administration has adopted policies that have put our nation at risk: open borders, creating dependence on the nonexistent goodwill of adversarial nations for essential resources, abusing the power of government to punish political opponents, using our education system to instruct young people that our founding and human nature are fundamentally wrong, and telling us that we just have to accept criminal behavior because our society has caused it.

Those visionaries who founded the Republican Party in 1854 agreed that America was worth preserving, and Minnesota Republicans intend to carry that mission forward in 2024. Democrats today seem just as committed to dividing our nation as they did then.

Republicans do not care what sex, race or religion you are. What we have in common as people is more important. We believe this nation is an exceptional inheritance, deserving of preservation as the “last best hope of mankind.” What we ask in this upcoming election is that the citizens of this nation come together and recognize our uniqueness, our common history, and the shared traditions that have made us one. Together, we are stronger and will continue to carry on the history and traditions that make us the greatest country in the world.

David Hann is chairman of the Minnesota Republican Party.