You love us. You hate us. (In the comments section, some of you seem to take particular relish in telling us how much you hate us.) But whatever you think, you read us. Again and again. Day after day. Article after article. And if you’re reading on the web site, it’s all free. We arrive in your e-mail box through the Morning Jolt and Goldberg File.
National Review articles inform you. They make you laugh. They make you think. They make you nod in agreement. Sometimes they make you shake your head in disagreement. Occasionally they make you throw your iPad across the room in frustration. (You probably shouldn’t do that; it’s not good for the iPad.)
You don’t like being asked for money? Believe me, it’s no better from this side. We wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t necessary. There’s advertising, there’s subscriptions to the magazine and digital versions, there’s some money from the cruises . . . and then there’s the generosity of readers like you. That’s it. There is no Uncle Rupert. There is no larger media conglomerate behind us. National Review is like a small family business, if a small family operation was in the business of altering American and human history. As George Will put it, “Without Bill Buckley, no National Review. Without National Review, no Goldwater nomination. Without the Goldwater nomination, no conservative takeover of the Republican party. Without that, no Reagan. Without Reagan, no victory in the Cold War. Therefore, Bill Buckley won the Cold War.”
It’s easy to feel like the political world has never been more embarrassing, the world has never been more violently unstable, the Left never more arrogant and far-reaching, the government less competent. But if you look back at National Review’s founding statement from 1955, you see an assessment of the world that feels like it could be written today:
[National Review] is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation . . .
One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things . . .
Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals’. . .
Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word. A vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is — dare we say it? — as necessary to better living as Chemistry.
Something so necessary to better living — an island of sanity in an insane world — has got to be worth a quick donation, right?
— Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent for National Review.