In 1978, I visited my first war zone, Beirut. There were, in fact, several wars going on. The Israelis had made an incursion in the south, but there was chaos everywhere, with various local militias squaring off in the streets. Two of them had battled each other for control of the Holiday Inn. Imagine that. Beirut, clearly, had been a civilized and sophisticated city; parts of it still were — and yet it was descending into the unthinkable. The lesson was stark: My American soul, my life experience, had assumed that civilization was a rock-solid given, especially in historic cultural and commercial centers like Beirut. But it wasn’t. It was a tenuous state of grace. It needed to be nurtured, protected.

That is why I’m voting for Kamala Harris for president. Civic order is the predicate for a diverse democracy like ours. It is the predicate for freedom. And we have been flirting, dangerously, with disorder and disunity in the Trump era.

My case for Ms. Harris is a conservative one, but it has little to do with the current nihilist havoc of the Republican Party — or its precursor, the libertarian, neoliberal reaction against government led by Ronald Reagan. It rests primarily on Ms. Harris’s respect for the traditions and institutions of our remarkable country. It also rests on two necessary adjustments she’s made to Democratic Party dogma: a move away from identity politics and a move away from the notional, indulgent pessimism of the academic left. That’s it. Three words: stability, unity, optimism.

In his first Inaugural Address, in January 1981, Ronald Reagan said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” He was wrong. Government could be arrogant and clumsy; it could make foolish attempts at social engineering and overregulation. The free enterprise system, undervalued by the left, was the most clever antidote to poverty ever invented. But capitalism could overreach, too — and government was the bulwark against the destructive excesses of greed and oligarchy.

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Ms. Harris, who was trained in the rule of law, understands viscerally the importance of the stability that government provides. Donald Trump doesn’t. He has attempted to destroy our faith in the institutions that keep us safe — the courts, the F.B.I., the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps, the military, even our electoral process and, this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Let’s focus just for a moment on the military: It is the template for the highest form of citizenship. It requires a solemn pledge to subsume your individuality to protect the greater good. According to his former chief of staff John Kelly, Mr. Trump has referred to service members as “suckers” and “losers” — though he has said that this was “a total lie.” The former president has absolutely no idea of the rigors the military requires, the notions of service and sacrifice. He is a stranger to the most basic requirements of a democracy.

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