Freedom is still always just one generation from extinction. Let’s keep it going together.
America didn’t have to be this way. It was a choice. And keeping it that way is a choice, too.
The British colonists in North America in 1775–76 were some of the freest, most prosperous, least-taxed people on the planet. Indeed, freedom of any kind was still so rare that Seymour Drescher, one of the great historians of slavery, summarized the global landscape of 1775 thus:
Personal bondage was the prevailing form of labor in most of the world. Personal freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution. In 1772, Arthur Young estimated that only 33 million of the world’s 775 million inhabitants could be called free. Adam Smith offered a similarly somber ratio to his students and prophesied that slavery was unlikely to disappear for ages, if ever.
Americans had their liberty and a good deal of self-government. They could have been content with that. The Canadians were. But Americans could also see those things being chipped away bit by bit by a crowned head and a Parliament in which they were voiceless and were not willing to wait until they were lost to do something about it. They wanted liberty and self-government guaranteed — and they wanted it in writing. So first they fought, and then they declared independence, and then they set to writing down the guarantees for themselves and their posterity.
That’s how we got state constitutions and the Articles of Confederation, both drafted during wartime. It’s why we kept holding elections even in states on the front lines. And it’s why, when the system seemed too weak to hold the new country together, they went back four years after the war and wrote the Constitution.
At National Review, we believe that America is still worth fighting for. And we hope you can help support our work by contributing to our “Defending America” webathon.
Self-government is a choice and should be jealously defended against judicial activists, permanent bureaucracies, entrenched elites, and amorphous international organizations accountable to nobody. The rule of written law is a choice, and its foes grow ever bolder in their campaign against the independence and fidelity of the courts. Personal and civil liberty is a choice. Economic liberty is a choice. Respect for human life is a choice. Public order is a choice. National security is a choice, because the enemies of liberty will never sleep.
Thankfully, liberty has always had friends as well, sometimes in the unlikeliest places. That’s why, while National Review has always remained first and foremost a national journal of American life and politics, we have also always covered the struggles of friends and allies outside our borders. One of those great friends of liberty here and in his home country was Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette. He came here as a teenaged aristocrat to fight for American freedom, and waged a long struggle in his home country to bring ordered liberty to Frenchmen through the trying times of the French Revolution and its aftermath. In 1824–25, as we approached the first of our big anniversaries of 1776, he returned for a triumphal tour of America.
That trip — its origins and its lessons — is the subject of Rick Brookhiser’s delightful new book, The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution. And starting this week, anyone who contributes $250 or more to our webathon will receive a free copy of his book, which will ship when it gets published on June 30.
We are asking for your help in our fiscal year-end webathon so we can close the books on 2025–26 on a strong note. It’s been an essential year for National Review and its mission, as the American left has grown more unhinged and more violent, while the populist right has illustrated time and again why it doesn’t have all the answers. If the right is going to defend our national heritage, it still needs the timeless truths, strong institutions, and devotion to the principles and documents that the Founders left us as our patrimony. I’m thankful to our readers for the opportunity to do my own bit this past year, including sit-down interviews with Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch that you can find only here at National Review. I’m grateful as well for so many fantastic colleagues standing guard on their own beats.
So, if you can help us keep up that mission with a donation large or small, please give here. Because America is a choice, and we intend to keep making it. And like the Founders, we need friends to help.
