Well, it’s that time again. Every December, as we look hopefully forward to the year to come, I do what other proud members of National Review Institute’s 1955 Society do: I make a contribution to support NRI’s invaluable work. I humbly suggest that you join me in doing so. Not only is it tax-exempt, but it is also money extraordinarily well spent.

There’s a shift taking place in our country — in the economy, the culture, and our politics. In a Thanksgiving column, I tried to grapple with what is driving the shift. We are moving from a 30-year period of comparative calm to one of turbulence. True, it didn’t always seem placid from the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 until this year, when its revanchist successor launched Europe’s first land war in over seven decades. But between jihadist attacks and financial meltdowns, there was the Pax Americana, a generation of relative international peace, record-low levels of crime, and unparalleled economic flourishing.

Things have changed for the worse. Government’s erratic handling of a once-in-a-century pandemic generated an education crisis of lost learning, simultaneously exacerbating social tensions that exploded into political violence of a scope and intensity not seen since the 1970s. Speaking of the Seventies, inflation is back, as are the rising interest rates that the Fed employs to combat it — even as out-of-control government debt spending courts a recession that could batter a society still struggling to emerge from Covid’s shocks to our system. And for the first time in 30 years, we face, in China, a rival on the international stage whose growing might and hegemonic ambitions pose a challenge that could be more ominous than the one faced down by such stalwart Cold Warriors as William F. Buckley Jr., NR’s founder.

Bill Buckley’s legacy, which NRI works tirelessly to preserve, becomes ever more significant in times like ours.

When I say things are shifting, I refer not just to the transformation from tranquility to strife, but the consequent shift from personalities to ideas. Societies in the midst of peaceful, profitable times tend to forget what got them there. They are susceptible to canards that undermine hard-won wisdom and demagogues who turn citizens against each other by stirring a pot of resentment and victimhood. To the contrary, a nation facing real threats can’t afford such agitprop. Its sustenance hinges on the revitalization of its bedrock ideas — liberty, constitutional conservatism, free markets, peace through strength.

Buckley created NR to be a beacon on these touchstones. NRI’s mission is to fortify them, and that is the work we do every day.

As an NRI fellow, I enjoy support from the Institute that enables me to focus on the real facts and principles implicated by our challenges, rather than the cartoonish version of them spun by partisans and in media coverage. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a conservative — not a neoconservative, a national conservative, a populist conservative, a compassionate conservative, or any other kind of [fill in the caveat] conservative — and I don’t pretend to be objective about policy. But we have to be objective about facts, about what’s true and what’s not true, if we are to have any hope of arriving at good — in my mind, conservative — policy.

In my wheelhouse, which involves investigations, litigation, the judiciary, and our law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, we’ve seen in the last few years an appalling amount of political narrative distorting cold, hard facts. We tend to dismiss the importance of this development as mere “political narrative.” But now, it is having real-world effects in the form of skyrocketing crime, a law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus that has lost much of the public’s confidence, and progressive political attacks on the independent judiciary — including threats to pack the Supreme Court for the apparent sin of restoring constitutional norms.

Our challenges become only more daunting unless we can counteract these trends. We need to show why crime is up, and why federal agencies need to do evidence-based enforcement and intelligence-gathering to maintain their legitimacy. We need to demonstrate that judges faithful to the Constitution are restoring republican democracy.

Getting back to basics, to bedrock ideas, is more vital now than it has been in decades. The rule of law, our education system, our economy, our capacity to govern, and our national security in the face of a new Cold War that too often teeters toward hot combat — all of them are under intense pressure. We can rescue them only with reality-based journalism that takes honest stock of our straits. It is only with the support of the NR community that we can continue providing that journalism, and thus continue having a real impact on policy-makers. That’s why I contributed today, and I hope you too will support National Review Institute — its vital mission and important work — with a tax-deductible, year-end gift.

Please click this secure link to donate.

As we look ahead to meeting our challenges, we at NRI wish you a happy, healthy 2023.