Editor’s note: This editorial represents our recommendation in the 2020 presidential election. Find our full slate of recommendations in local and state races here, and use our Voter Guide to compare candidates and create your own ballot.

If asked to identify one thing that has made this country unique and a model for the world, we would say this: From the start, this nation was always an idea, a concept about liberty that had both practical implications for how people live and that also invited a perpetual debate about how society should be organized to expand and safeguard our rights.

Today, the United States is in the midst of a fresh presidential election and there is more at stake than the future of one candidate, than the ability of one party or the other to control the levers of power in Washington. The country is at a crossroads, a point at which its voters will make crucial decisions about such fundamental issues as what role government should play in our lives, how officials will lead this large and fractious country, when we should build and sustain international alliances, and even the very ideas we should be known for in the world.

Every election is pitched as a crucial moment in our history, a point when we can either pivot into a bright future or fall into an abyss. What’s different this year is a twofold problem that is much more prominent than it has been in years past. First, there is a broad push to drive our politics to extremes, to destroy without building consensus for what should be rebuilt.

Second, our political debates are being driven not by policy proposals or governing principles but by assessments of political personalities and, too often, populist passions on the right and the left. And one danger is that personality-driven politics can end up empowering a person or a party without voters having seriously debated policy implications. Personality-driven elections can obscure what’s at stake. So in such an environment, voters can end up empowering those intent on making radical changes that do not have the support of even a large bloc of the electorate.

At this moment of decision and change, we have decided to change, too. This year The Dallas Morning News will break from its traditional practice of recommending one candidate over another for president of the United States. Rather than making a presidential recommendation, we will endorse ideas; rather than recommending one candidate, we will offer a vision for the country. That vision will be guided by fundamental principles that can inform voters as they ascertain what’s at stake in the election and the political battles ahead.

On a local and a state level this year, we are surfacing details about candidates that many voters wouldn’t know otherwise, and therefore we are offering recommendations to voters to help inform how they might cast their ballots. But on a national level, we can best serve our readers by sorting through the messages that politicians throw at voters. This year, that role requires more than offering a single candidate our recommendation.

This year, we will publish a series of articles laying out policy prescriptions on a variety of issues that will range from immigration, tax and economic policy, to entitlement reform, to public education and trade policies. We’ll publish pieces on presidential leadership, America’s role in world affairs and international alliances. We will do this by offering specific advice through our unique lens of what our experiences in Texas can offer in terms of policy making. After all, many of the issues, such as crime and education reform, are playing out in our midst. And we will publish this work throughout the year in a series we will call “What’s at Stake 2020.”

We believe in liberty

Our principles are straightforward and have long guided our editorials. We believe in human liberty and the moral good of supporting the expansion and preservation of that liberty, as well as the ingenuity such an expansion unlocks. We believe it is in the American people’s best interest to defend individual liberty, the rule of law and alliances with like-minded democracies. We believe in responsible government with sound fiscal, economic and security policies. We believe that society must arc toward justice, compassion and responsibility. That means we believe in equality of opportunity and of equal treatment by government. It also means we believe in policies often described as compassionate, but that might be better thought of as addressing fundamental issues that can encourage or enable people to fulfill their full potential. These policies deal with such issues as health care and education, among others. Crucially, that also means that we recognize that each person has moral agency, all people have the capacity and responsibility to bring to the fore their best efforts, even as a society we should expand the capacity of all to reach their potential.

In a large and bustling society such as ours, there are always a multitude of forces driving change, but we will pull out a few to illustrate the challenges and opportunities before us.

The first is this: For decades, we have needed to engage in a thorough and robust debate about the future structure and cost of entitlement programs and other aspects of domestic policies, some of which date back to the era of the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and later Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. At a fundamental level, such a debate involves the role of government as well as the role personal responsibility plays in confronting issues as a society.

In some ways, of course, this debate has been happening since before Roosevelt was in the White House in the 1930s and 1940s. And over the years, new programs have been launched and others have faced significant reform. Medicaid, for example, was added as a health care program for the poor in the 1960s. Similarly, in the 1990s, Congress enacted welfare reform and thereby injected a significant element of personal responsibility into a high-profile social program that a large bloc of voters had demanded for decades. But in many ways, this debate has bubbled along without resolution.

In our system, public debates play out over the course of years and in the form of legislation that introduces ideas into law. Over time, we can see the results of such reforms and either revise the approach if it isn’t working or expand it if it is to address other problems. With welfare reform, we saw this dynamic play out to some degree because it represented an idea long debated.

By the late 1990s, as Bill Clinton’s presidency came to a close, and then when George W. Bush was elected, the country was ready for a more thorough discussion and vetting of ideas that promised to bring competitive pressures, data-driven decision making and accountability through the expansion of personal responsibility to social programs ranging from health care to education to retirement.

One sad cost of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, however, is that such a debate was delayed. Under Bush, Congress did pass education reform (No Child Left Behind) with broad bipartisan support and added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare that was driven by market competition. America made these reforms because smart, honest people engaged in smart, honest debate. Rather than belittling intelligent disagreement, we engaged it. Rather than dismissing opponents based on whom they voted for, we sought solutions to common problems, even if sometimes the solution we settled on was short of our preferred outcome. But broadly speaking, voters were preoccupied by security concerns and didn’t seem to offer sustained support for large-scale change. Entitlement reform on the scale needed to control federal deficits in the long-term never materialized.

The second force that is driving change is the reality that it’s hard to enact thoughtful reforms in moments of crisis, and this country has had more crises than usual over the past two decades. The terrorist attacks were just one. Protracted military conflicts are absorbed by society as a form of crisis, and the war in Iraq offered more than that before the surge finally defeated the insurgents at the time.

The financial crisis of 2008 forced the country to deal with near-fatal flaws in the financial system and to confront the reality that much of that system could have been destroyed in a panic that followed a mania in housing. And for years, there has been a silent crisis leading to a near panic among millions of Americans. That crisis has come in the form of drug addictions, the disappearance of jobs outside of the knowledge economy, and deepening sense that hope and prosperity are slipping out of reach.

A third force driving a desire for change is an impatience with the pace of progress. Even while we note the country has made a lot of progress to make it possible for more Americans to experience the American dream, it remains true that as a people we are in danger of forgetting our history. And to know where we should go as a nation, we need to know where we’ve been. Nor is there a consensus on even the ideas that offer the most promise for extending the progress that has been made.

This election is larger than Trump

All of this is interpretative history, and there are other issues we might name, but we risk such an oversimplification here for a specific reason. To forge a consensus on how to move forward, it’s important to recognize the unresolved tension over major public policies that has existed for decades. It should be clear by the results of the 2016 election that a significant number of voters sought to impose significant change on Washington.

Many of these voters face economic uncertainty even as the top-line statistics of the economy show sustained growth. These voters also are dealing with the ravages of the opioid crisis and want governing institutions to respect their needs. We’d argue that these voters should have a voice in national debates. In fact, every voter should have a voice.

What’s at stake in this election is larger than Trump voters or voters who are intent on changing the occupant of the Oval Office. It’s actually larger than any voting bloc on the political scene. What’s at stake in 2020 is the basic art of democracy.

We’ve reached a point where we’ve become uncivil to each other, where strategies have devolved into finding one way or another to ram through even major policy changes that include such radical steps as abolishing private health insurance or designing tax programs to punish economic success (rather than with the simple aim of raising the revenue the government needs to function).

Our elections used to be about persuasion. Now the tactics seem focused on turning out each major party’s base and stirring up antipathy – what Arthur C. Brooks described at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast as a “crisis of contempt” – rather than building the political capital and common ground needed to enact and sustain significant, meaningful and durable change. What’s at stake is what kind of country we will become when warring parties devolve into demonizing half of our people who happen to disagree on one issue or another.

We are of a mind that a president of the United States is supposed to serve every citizen, regardless of how he or she voted in the past election. And we’re of a mind that both parties should act like they understand this fact.

The genius of the American system is that it continually forces us to come back to the table. Every two years, we have a federal election. Every four years, we either elect a new president or offer a referendum on the current resident of the White House. Over time, the string of federal elections can forge a consensus on core issues. But the truth is that success is not assured, it is possible for our elections to produce policy mistakes that set us back. So what’s before us is a responsibility to use our elections to forge a consensus and elevate leaders capable of working past divisions.

The path forward starts with civility and what one political commentator once called “patriotic grace.” Civility makes it possible to raise your concerns and hear the concerns of others. Civility makes it possible to gain buy-in, forge consensus and agree to disagree in one area while working toward common solutions on other issues. If politics is the art of the possible, civility increases the range of what is possible.

We stand here with Abraham Lincoln, who reminded us in his second inaugural address, as a long and brutal civil war was coming to a close, that we should proceed with “malice toward none, with charity toward all.” Americans have a right to demand more from their elected representatives, and that includes demanding a level of professionalism and leadership that makes it possible to win broad support for needed reforms.

We’ll start that conversation on civility, with malice toward none, by framing and supporting ideas rather than a candidate for president this year. We hope this approach will build support for good policy. We hope it will help our system function after all of the ballots are counted. And we hope it will empower you, the voter. For our fate resides in your hands.