Hayes Gahagan is a former state legislator and founder and managing member of Loring Holdings, LLC. He lives in Castle Hill.

Americans are again being asked to choose between two incompatible worldviews. One sees liberty as a God-given power of individual choice, bound by moral responsibility. The other treats liberty as a collective entitlement administered by experts. Between those poles lies the survival of our republic.

David Horowitz spent a lifetime tracing this conflict. Once a leading voice of the New Left in the 1960s, he witnessed firsthand how radical movements evolve when moral absolutes are abandoned. His later conversion to constitutional conservatism made him one of America’s most articulate defenders of Judeo-Christian values, free markets and individual freedom.

Through more than 30 books — including “Unholy Alliance,” “Dark Agenda,” “The Enemy Within” and “America Betrayed” — he chronicled the ideological war against Western civilization and the moral underpinnings of the American experiment.

Horowitz died from cancer at his home in Parker, Colorado, on April 29, 2025, at the age of 86. His passing marked the loss of one of the last great public intellectuals willing to challenge the orthodoxy of both political parties. His courage, intellect and unyielding devotion to truth deserve deep gratitude and remembrance.

The first creed — the American one — begins with accountability to God and law. It insists that rights are endowed, not granted, and that government exists to secure them, not dispense them. This framework produced both the representative form of government and its economic companion, the free market system. In both, the individual is sovereign: one citizen, one vote; one producer, one voluntary exchange. Competition disciplines excess; consent legitimizes authority. Freedom and responsibility are inseparable.

The opposing creed, whether labeled progressive, socialist or “woke,” begins with a different premise: that society, not the individual, is supreme. Justice becomes redistribution, truth becomes narrative and equality means enforced outcomes. The administrative state replaces elected representation; regulation replaces risk; dependency replaces dignity. The result is not compassion but control — a soft tyranny justified by the language of fairness.

Horowitz’s message was unsparing: nations do not lose liberty overnight — they educate themselves out of it. When schools teach grievance instead of gratitude, and civics is replaced by ideology, the foundation cracks. A people that no longer understands how its government is meant to operate cannot tell when it has been hijacked.

He reminded readers that America’s founders built a system designed precisely to contain power. A representative republic separates functions — legislative, executive, judicial — and subjects each to the consent of the governed. Its free-market partner disperses economic power the same way: through choice, competition and ownership. Both systems depend on moral citizens who value liberty more than privilege.

The remedy is not another bureaucracy but a return to citizen education. Americans must again learn the structure, function and correct operation of their own government. They must understand that our republic is not a democracy of emotion but a covenant of reason; not mob rule, but law rule. When citizens grasp that distinction, they see why liberty can survive only where power is divided and markets are free.

If Horowitz was right — and history affirms that he was — then the decisive battle of our era is not political but educational. The question is simple: Do we still know how liberty works?

To preserve, protect and defend it, Americans must once again become students of our own republic. Only an informed citizenry can sustain the government the Founders designed — strong enough to restrain tyranny yet limited enough to leave each of us free to choose, to act and, when necessary, to choose again.

These are the blessings of liberty — and the American citizen’s inalienable right and responsibility to preserve, protect and defend them.