I was feeling very nostalgic during Wednesday’s Mount Vernon Statement signing ceremony. I spoke during it and couldn’t help but feel Bill Buckley’s presence in the room. Not because I would ever presume to know what he — who died two years ago next week — might do or say or think about current circumstances, but because we all kept citing him! The Mount Vernon Statement is crafted by a coalition of social, economic, and national-security conservatives and meant to be in the tradition of the 1960 Sharon Statement. Read it. Sign it if you like.

I signed the physical document right under former attorney general Ed Meese’s name, which was a cool thing for a geek like me to do.

Here are the brief remarks I gave on land that was once owned by George Washington, as part of his River Farm:

Some of the most liberating words in American history were the words “We hold these truths!” In a culture frequently seduced by relativism, we believe there is, in fact, truth. And that’s why we’re here.
We may have public-policy differences. We may wake up and show up at our different bases of operations with different motivations and ultimate goals. But we can sit down and fairly easily agree that there are some basic and essential cards our Founders put on the table, and that they are as relevant and as necessary today as they ever.
And so our simple message today is: To go forward, we must look back. We needn’t — and nothing in this statement does — reinvent the wheel. To go forward, we must preserve these Constitutional principles that are being highlighted here in the Mount Vernon Statement.
And this gathering today, much like the tea parties and renewed enthusiasm for civic involvement around the country, is good news. Yes, liberty, has, in fact, been under attack. But that’s no cause for running to clean out the old fallout shelters to hide in as our modern-day catacombs.
Not just here today, but across the nation, we’re seeing Americans do what Bill Buckley did in 1955. In that same first issue of National Review that has already been mentioned here, Bill Buckley wrote in his Publisher’s Statement on which National Review was founded: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
That is as relevant today as it ever was. And today we do it offline and on. On Twitter and Facebook and whatever the next technology will be.
“Mr. Buckley,” as I loved knowing him in his final years, around NR’s NY headquarters, also wrote: “We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough!”
“It isn’t enough,” he continued. “But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D’s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.”
The National Review Institute recently commissioned a study of 1,000 likely voters. Six percent of them said they had participated in tea parties and another 47 percent said that they had not participated in one but “generally agree with the reasons for the protests.” Their view of themselves was not of a group of reactive angry voters. They are people who centr-right issues speak to. Theya re people who people who sign this statement can speak to.
They may or may not necessarily call themselves conservatives or sign this statement today. But Americans are, in fact, attracted to human freedom. They are attracted to political figures and personalities who exude that same desire. They are attracted to policy ideas that respect it and help it to flourish. And so here we are. Same as we ever were, bound by the Constitution.