President Trump was right to characterize Tuesday’s midterm elections as a choice between jobs and mobs. Common sense dictates that Republican candidates are offering us a path to continued progress, while Democrats want to move our nation in the wrong direction.

The president and Republicans in Congress have a proven record of success in creating jobs and strengthening our economy with tax cuts and the elimination of excessive regulations that do far more harm than good. Wages are climbing and our unemployment rate of 3.7 percent is at the lowest level since 1969. American manufacturing jobs are coming back beyond all expectations, as if someone waved a magic wand.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has moved so far to the left that it has left most Americans behind. The party no longer represents the views of the mainstream, but instead embraces radical policies that used to be held only by fringe extremist groups.

Many Democratic candidates on the ballot Tuesday have more in common with socialists than the party of 20th century Democratic presidents and center-left members of Congress. Some Democrats today even openly embrace socialism, despite the record of failure of that system of Big Government control that has led to economic ruin and loss of freedom in many parts of the world.

While other nations have been abandoning socialism in droves to create free markets and embrace individual liberty, too many in the Democratic Party are heading in the opposite direction, positioning themselves on the wrong side of history.

The said truth is that the Democratic Party has been taken over by its most radical wing, eaten from within by the parasitic, socialist left.

And if you don’t think that this trend of socialism inside the Democratic Party will accelerate if Democrats do well in the midterm elections, you’re kidding yourself. The grassroots “muscle” and the money, both large and small, within the party are most assuredly concentrated on far left. Because of that, the party will be compelled to move even farther left in coming years.

Most American will not be willing to cut ties with their past – but embracing socialism in this country requires exactly that. I don’t believe that most Americans want to abandon who we are as a people and what has made us great. Yet too many in the media, professors and administrators on college campuses, and other radicals in the Democratic Party are calling on us to do just that.

Fortunately, Republicans refuse to take this path. The party of Lincoln refuses to become the party of Lenin.

While Republicans have brought a new level of prosperity and an economic resurgence to our country, radical leftists and their Democratic allies have done all they can to obstruct progress and take protests to the streets, the halls of Congress, the Supreme Court, and any place they can find Trump administration officials. Protesters have forced Trump administration officials and Republican members of Congress out of restaurants and theaters and even staged protests at the homes of officials.

Instead of condemning such behavior, many Democrats have condoned it. Hillary Clinton has said Democrats can’t be civil until they take control of Congress. Former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder has advised Democrats dealing with Republicans: “When they go low, we kick ‘em.”

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., has told supporters: “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. …If you see anybody from that (Trump) Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

It’s staggering to think that we’ve gotten to the point where one of our major political parties considers this behavior acceptable and encourages it. Their allies in the media cheer them on and accuse Trump supporters and the GOP of racism and violence.

In contrast, President Trump has sharply denounced violence by deranged people who have expressed support for some of his positions.

The president strongly condemned the actions of a man who sent bombs (that fortunately failed to go off) through the mail to Trump critics. And the president denounced anti-Semitism in the strongest possible terms after a mass murderer shot and killed 11 Jews praying in a Pittsburgh synagogue. The president even visited the synagogue to show his commitment to stamping out political violence and religious prejudice, and to mourn the loss of the dead.

So the question before voters Tuesday is whether they should reward the far-left candidates of the Democratic Party and the angry demonstrators who support them with control of the House and Senate so they can obstruct, resist and fight every move of the Trump administration. Or, should voters cast their ballots in support of Republicans who will build on the progress President Trump and the GOP Congress have made in the past two years?

The choice is obvious. Despite their claim to the label “progressives” Democrats are really about fighting progress that Republicans have made in the past two years to Make America Great Again.

America is one of the greatest nations – perhaps the greatest nation – the world has ever seen. That’s not a jingoistic statement but one based on the fact that we have by the numbers offered more freedom and more opportunity to the greatest number of men and women.

And make no mistake: greatness is a choice, as in many ways decline is a choice. Our Founders, in a small agrarian nation on the edge of a Euro-centric world, in the age of the divine right of kings, chose a far different path. They chose a path of self-government and of a constitutional republic, with the firm belief that all power flowed from the people to their representatives.

America’s Founders firmly believed that government was necessary, as we’re no angels, but that it should be limited in size and scope and that free markets would lead to a free people.

The left wants to leave much of that behind. Our response to the radical leftists who have seized control of the Democratic Party to advance extremist policies must be that we reject their dangerous road to socialism. We choose to be great. We choose to be true to America’s founding principles.

In the days leading up to the War for American Independence, Dr. Joseph Warren, that great son of liberty, stood before the people of Boston in the Old South Meeting House and declared: “On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important questions upon which rests the happiness and the liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.”

It is my sincere hope and prayer that the American people act worthy of themselves in these times. The future happiness, prosperity and freedom of generations yet to come depends on it.