Support National Review Institute because it keeps us grounded in timeless principles while we look to the present and the future.
This is a good time of year to reflect upon the bigger and more permanent things. Which brings me to National Review Institute, the nonprofit journalistic think tank that preserves and promotes William F. Buckley Jr.’s legacy and advances the conservative principles he championed. (You can support the mission and work of NRI with a tax-deductible gift here.)
National Review, of which this website is a part, is a journal of politics and culture. Of necessity, politics is of the moment. New things to be said about culture are also often about the culture of the moment, whether that means cultural battles in our politics and our institutions, new trends in our culture, or new works of art, letters, entertainment, and creation.
As conservatives, however, our values and principles rest on something older and deeper than the moment, our concerns go beyond the moment, and even our judgment of the moment is always informed by what has gone before. We are not ossified in the past, because we understand that the people in the past weren’t, either; they took the world they found and added something to it, of their own moment. But those who did so constructively chose to be stewards of their inheritance, not Jacobins who can see only their own moment.
That is where National Review Institute comes in.
NRI is, in a nutshell, what makes National Review more than just a journal; it is also the keeper of the flame of the history of the modern conservative movement in America, including the role of William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review in that movement.
The Institute doesn’t just support the work of NRI fellows (such as myself) who write for National Review and projects like NR Capital Matters but also (among other things) holds speaking events and connects with NR readers, educates young people in the history and principles of the movement and promotes the professional development of the next generation, and runs the Buckley Legacy Project, which in 2025 will celebrate the centennial of Buckley’s birth.
Buckley himself was a young man in a hurry, who turned 30 the month he produced the first issue of National Review. He was never too proud or stuck in the past to change his mind about things, but what made a young man’s magazine something more was its recognition that it was unearthing old and tested ideas more than coining new ones.
Fun fact: When you Google Buckley’s name, the first question under “People also ask” is, “Is William F. Buckley still alive?” So long as National Review and NRI have anything to say, the answer in some sense will be “yes.”
As important as the specific daily work of NRI is its spirit. The sense of carrying on a legacy of the past, and of carrying an obligation to preserve the past for the future, is both a sobering and a comforting one, reminding us neither to get carried away with passing trends nor to despair that all is doomed. All has always been doomed. Yet, here we still are.
As 2022 comes to a close, and you review your own end-of-year giving, I hope you will find some room to support NRI’s work. There will be other years, and other moments, and even other causes for despair. And there will still be a need for an eye on the permanent and the enduring.