With Inauguration Day a few days away, let’s pick up where we left off 13 weeks ago, just before Election Day.

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.

Such statists can leave their countries in varying degrees and types of ruin. The previous 100 years or so haven’t been short on such statists.

Their siren songs can indeed be tempting. Their pleas can lure the public into turning away from ordered liberty and surrendering the keys to the kingdom.

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Statists, once empowered, tend not to take long to leave ruin in their wake.

In late 2023, this columnist’s mother–who, having been blessed with a long earthly life, died a year ago today with him by her side–was watching a broadcast report on the ruin the Biden administration was leaving in its wake. She offered this insightful observation: “You know, I always thought the United States would always exist. Now I’m not so sure.”

Therein lay this unpleasant truth: If we don’t get a hold of this country in many of the right ways, we can lose it in multiple ways.

Freedom, as Ronald Reagan said, is never more than a generation away from extinction.

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It’s always tempting, on Inauguration Day, for victors–no matter who they are or the political party to which they belong–to believe that history begins anew on their team’s first day in office.

Yet the tides of history rarely turn completely on what happens in any one election, much less on any one Inauguration Day.

Advanced Western countries tend to be resilient. Nevertheless, what additional ruin would have befallen the United States during a second term of the Biden administration is frightening to imagine.

Spurning inflation partly by constraining energy production, and letting millions of illegal aliens–including criminals and terrorists–into the country, some with illegal drugs, are just a few of the Biden administration’s transgressions.

And those are only domestic transgressions, which haven’t stopped even during the Biden administration’s waning days.

For example, through an executive order issued in January, the Biden administration has declared much of the American coastline off limits to oil exploration.

President-elect Donald Trump observed that the value of such oil exceeds the national debt. Since those oil reserves belong to the United States, America could use them to pay off–yes, pay off–the national debt.

That would begin to put this country onto a course of fiscal sanity from which it began departing long ago, and especially in recent decades, under the leadership of both major parties.

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In retrospect, some presidential elections, including 2024’s, have mattered more than others in this sense: The philosophical gulf between the two major-party presidential candidates was wider.

While running for president in 2020, former Vice President Joe Biden said he was no moderate. This column picked up on that on March 14, 2020, and observed: “One need not be a member of any particular party, or have particular political beliefs, to understand that on this point, Biden is right.”

It takes no political genius to observe that Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ 2024 presidential candidate, is even more liberal than Biden.

So on Election Day, America dodged a bullet.

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Speaking of dodging a bullet–or, in this case, mostly dodging a bullet–it’s no secret that if any one of many variables hadn’t worked in Trump’s favor on an early summer Saturday in Pennsylvania in 2024, Trump may well not have survived.

It’s possible that was luck. Trump is of a different mind: It was providence. He may well be right, in no small measure because, in this instance, luck is a bit much to believe.

Whatever it was, beginning on Jan. 20, when Trump takes the oath of office as the 47th president of the United States, it’s time to get a hold of this country in all of the right ways.

Please re-read the second paragraph in today’s column. Every generation must defend ordered liberty. We dare not, we must not, let it collapse.

Godspeed, Mr. President. Godspeed.

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With Dr. Randy Elf’s weekly column having debuted on March 14, 2020, today’s column is No. 250.

(c) 2025 BY RANDY ELF