Thank you for your belief that principles matter and for sticking with us, even when it is unpopular.
How’s your 2024 been?
For the National Review enterprise, it’s been a wild year. At the eleventh annual William F. Buckley Jr. Prize Dinner in Chicago, National Review Institute gave the William F. Buckley Jr. Prize for Leadership in Political Thought to Acton Institute president emeritus and co-founder Father Robert Sirico and the William F. Buckley Jr. Prize for Leadership in Supporting Liberty to the Searle Freedom Trust’s Kim Dennis. If you turn on your television this very second, there’s about a 50–50 chance that our man Andy McCarthy is on Fox News. You may have heard that Kevin Hassett, the senior adviser to National Review Capital Matters, has another job in the new year, directing the White House National Economic Council for the incoming Trump administration.
In other good news, the moose did not eat my family while in Denali National Park during the NRI cruise to Alaska, and I’ve had a chance to speak to NRI supporters in Atlanta, Kansas City, Denver, and Palm Beach this year — a lot about Ukraine and Taiwan, and, after the election, the outlook on the domestic front, including reasons for optimism.
There are a lot of reasons I’m proud to be affiliated with National Review Institute, but one big reason on my mind lately is how it stands for first principles in a political world full of people who will turn on a dime and argue today the opposite of what they argued yesterday. (Perhaps the most comical and shameless example are the Democratic senators who, now facing life in the minority, are suddenly singing the praises of the filibuster they spent the past four years trying to destroy.) You can find a lot of people in the world of politics and media who start with the conclusion and reason backward from there.
We start from first principles and reason forward from there, not backward from the conclusion that is most convenient.
National Review has a clear and explicit mission statement — you can read the whole thing here — but the nutshell section is, “All our efforts are geared toward preserving that experiment and the foundations of American exceptionalism—in particular the ordered liberty that reflects the Founders’ belief in our ability to govern ourselves as well as their clear-eyed view that we need institutional and cultural constraints, personal virtue, and, above all, religious faith to maintain the predicates of freedom.”
And as I suspect you can see, starting from those first principles and reasoning forward makes a big difference. That often aligns us with like-minded political figures and elected officials, but not always. The conservative movement and the Buckley legacy is a mansion with many rooms, and you’ll find occasional disagreements, even impassioned ones, among our fellows, contributors, and supporters. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Thank you for your belief that principles matter and for sticking with us, even when it is unpopular.
Will you continue to stand with us in this effort? You can do so by making a generous, tax-deductible contribution to National Review Institute’s end-of-year campaign today. Thank you for your support.
May God bless you and bring you a safe, prosperous, and wise year to come.