This year is one of special significance for both our country and National Review. For this institution, it is a year of growth and renewal; for the nation, it is a year in which we celebrate the moment, 250 years ago, when the truth that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” was proclaimed as the foundation of a new republic. From that proposition came the greatest nation in human history.
This is a moment not only for celebration, but for reflection. A free people cannot preserve what it no longer understands. If we are to honor the American founding, we must do more than admire it. We must recover its principles, defend them, and apply them to the challenges of our own time.
National Review exists to advance, clarify, and defend — to conserve — the permanent truths of the American founding. The conservative movement, to which this institution gave voice and force, exists to conserve those first principles without which America loses its coherence and its character.
Ours is a constitutional order grounded in truths held to be self-evident and rights understood to be natural. Our nation’s founders understood that liberty was not a gift from the state. It preceded the state. Government exists to secure it. In the advancement of these eternal truths, National Review is unapologetic and unyielding.
The American experiment rests on a simple but demanding idea: that human beings are capable of self-government, but only if power is restrained and liberty is protected. George Washington understood this clearly. In his Farewell Address, he called the union the “main prop of your liberty” and said that love of the one ought to endear to us the preservation of the other. In other words, love of liberty should strengthen our love of country, and love of country should deepen our resolve to preserve the institutions that make liberty possible.
National Review advocates for, perhaps even yells, the principles of America’s founding, ensuring their preservation and application to the challenges of our time — as our original mission statement said, even if “no one else is inclined to do so.” We know that you are so inclined, and for that, and any support you can provide, you have our eternal gratitude.
