The 2020 election offers today’s voters nothing less than a chance to take their place among the American heroes who stood tall for the nation in its times of greatest need. And all it takes is casting a ballot.

To vote in the age of the coronavirus is to defend a country facing the twin threats of a killer disease and an assault on our rights, civil liberties and values by President Donald Trump and the extremist Republicans in his cult of personality.

We can turn the tide, and place the country on a path back to the type of stable and compassionate leadership that truly made America exceptional.

We know the right way forward, because great people’s movements have shown the way. All we have to do is follow the footsteps of the abolitionists, the women’s suffragists, the civil rights marchers, the supporters of women’s rights and LGBT equality, labor-rights reformers, and, most recently, the millions who coalesced into the Black Lives Matter movement.

In every case, these Americans faced forces bent on stopping progress toward racial and social justice, and on retaining power and privilege in the hands of a select few. But those who battled for the American ideal of liberty and justice for all refused to give in.

The crisis we face today from Trump and the GOP echoes those moments from our history. Today’s Republicans are desperately trying to turn back the clock on virtually all of the causes for which reformers fought, bled and died: racial equality, gender equality, income equality, equal opportunities in the workplace, equal access to health care and education, a clean environment for all Americans, an honest government where corruption is a crime rather than a hobby, and much more.

But Trump and the Republican leadership’s vandalism of American ideals has no parallel in history—it has subverted the structure of our democracy and driven Americans into competing camps ideologically. Before 2016, who could have imagined a U.S. president brazenly misusing the Justice Department as a personal political tool against his enemies to seek political prosecutions, or sending unidentified federal forces to make extrajudicial arrests of protesters, or turning a public health crisis into a wedge issue over the wearing of masks while Americans perish, or allowing vested interests to take over and gut federal institutions and regulatory bodies, or happily trampling human rights at home and abroad, to name a few of the horrors we’ve seen in the past four years.

Literally every day brings a new outrage by the Trump regime—even listing them all would take weeks to compile.

Meanwhile, with the help of their propagandists at Fox News and other extremist media organizations, they fan flames of racial hatred by emboldening white nationalists and militia members, and vilifying Black Lives Matter protesters by characterizing them as violent anarchists.

They’re even targeting the most fundamental of American rights—the power of the vote—through gerrymandering and mass-scale voter suppression methods. Their tactics include reducing polling places, establishing overly restrictive ballot authorization requirements that allow huge numbers of ballots to be tossed out over technicalities, even altering ballots or mailing phony ones to voters, and outright voter intimidation. They have sown the seeds of doubt among many people who live in the Fox News/Breitbart/OAN bubble, and the long-term costs to this society of the violent threats unleashed by the times will take years to sort out.

There are more abuses of power, of course—many more than can be cataloged here. But other areas where Trump’s wrecking ball of a presidency has badly damaged the nation include his dangerously incompetent response to the pandemic, cruelty to immigrants and refugees, assaults on decorum and civility, war on science, self-destructive tariffs, teardown of environmental protections and erratic international relations that have spurned our allies, emboldened our enemies and reduced the U.S. to being a source of pity in the global community.

But fortunately Americans can still vote, and that vote counts. Thanks to that ballot, everyday Americans have a chance to do something for the ages this year.

The key is to drive out Republican extremism in favor of reasonable, responsible leaders.

That starts with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who will replace the recklessness of the current administration with professional, experienced leadership and put the nation on a path toward stabilizing and healing. (See our endorsement of Biden and Harris, as well as our recommendations on all ballot races and questions, on Pages 11-28.)

Voting this year will be more complicated than in previous elections, of course. Now it involves the decision over whether to vote in person—and help offset the chance that Trump and the GOP will invalidate mail-in ballots—or go ahead and cast a ballot by mail.

That’s a personal decision that must be made on every individual’s health situation, of course, but Clark County took the pandemic fully into account when preparing for this year’s balloting. Early-voting sites will be open through October 30, and there are additional sites where voters can hand-deliver mail-in ballots. Meanwhile, at early voting sites and election-day voting centers, the county has established an array of coronavirus precautions. Those include mask requirements for staff and voters (or isolated sites for voters who are not comfortable wearing a mask), clear shields between staff and voters, wiping down voting equipment between uses and enforcing social distancing guidelines.

The upshot: Voters can cast their ballots safely.

For all Americans, it’s a chance to carry on the legacy of a long list heroes who stepped out of everyday life and did something special: Think John Lewis, the sharecropper’s son who became a civil rights leader and congressman; or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who rose from a working-class home in Flatbush to a pioneering role in the women’s equality movement and a seat on the Supreme Court; or the millions of members of the Greatest Generation who sacrificed overseas and at home to protect the world from tyranny.

Thanks to those Americans and many, many more like them, our foundational goals of equality and justice are still attainable, and our global leadership role as the most powerful and aspirational nation on earth hasn’t been damaged beyond repair.

But this is a pivotal moment. If we don’t take the right path, we might never recover what we’ve lost in the last four years, and the contributions of those who came before us will have gone to waste.

We can’t let that happen. By voting, we can take our own stand on the road to progress, and do something for which future generations of Americans will forever be grateful.