NR needs your help to defeat socialism.
We may be months away from the most radical major-party nominee in American history.
Bernie Sanders doesn’t belong on the Burlington City Council, let alone on the cusp of the American presidency, but that’s where the Democratic nomination would bring him.
NR has jousted with socialists over the years — one of Bill Buckley’s first adversaries on Firing Line was the perennial fringe socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas. But never before has a self-declared socialist been at the center of American political life the way Bernie Sanders is now, and he may just be getting started.
The Vermont socialist seeks to fundamentally change the character of the country. He’d make the United States an outlier in the Western world, not in terms of its relatively limited government, but its sweeping activism. He’d blow past Western European social democracies in government profligacy, and bring to the Oval Office a sympathy for America’s enemies not often heard outside academia or Noam Chomsky reading groups.
That he has a hold on a third of the Democratic Party is bad enough; that he’s a rock star to America’s youth is unbelievably depressing.
Make no mistake — even if Bernie fades, we are in a generational struggle against socialist dogmas and lies that have a disturbing allure for young people and an unbreakable grip on parts of academia.
There’s no better place to combat them than National Review. We are completely committed to this fight, down to the marrow of our bones. We know the arguments, and can make them in a compelling way. We are immune to fashionable trends that have some on the right embracing old socialistic assumptions dressed up as an exciting new populism. We are very often the first contact young people have with real conservatism, and give them the ammunition to resist the laziness and thoughtlessness of their teachers and peers.
And we do it with verve and wit — and mockery as warranted.
Please help us in this fight. You can give $1,000, $500, $100, or $50. Really, any amount helps.
When socialism is on the march, we need to muster every ounce of our strength and fight for our economic freedoms, for common sense, and for the finest traditions of a country that Bernie Sanders wants to trample under his heedlessly destructive political revolution.