The first day of the Battle of Shiloh was an absolute debacle for Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee. On April 6, 1862, the five federal divisions at Pittsburgh Landing were caught with their pants around their ankles by attacking southern regiments. Grant’s men, with their backs to the Tennessee River, barely held on, prevented from being driven into the Tennessee only by tough, desperate fighting and by nightfall.

Late that evening, William Tecumseh Sherman found General Grant chewing a cigar under a tree. “Well, Grant,” Sherman asked him, “we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?”

“Yes,” Grant replied. “Lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

Electoral party politics isn’t war. It’s certainly not civil war. But there are lessons to be taken from the peculiar, and well-established, American tendency to start slowly.

From the initial American stumbles in 1917, to the disasters of 1941 and 1942 in the Pacific, to the defeat at Kasserine Pass and forward, Americans have usually taken it on the chin early on.

Thankfully, we’re quick learners.

Well, the American conservative movement and its very imperfect, sometime political vehicle, the Republican Party, have taken it on the chin this month.

The question now is, “Are conservatives ready to learn, or must we suffer a needless second kick of the mule?”

For going on 70 years, National Review has worked to pave the way forward for conservatives, looking around the bends in the road beyond the wins and losses of any particular election.

NR has long argued that politics is downstream from the culture, and the culture is downstream from the strength or weakness of the family.

That’s why we’ve featured radical pro-family ideas and special issues of the magazine on rebuilding American education, alongside our efforts to tirelessly work to fill the policy gap left by a listless Republican Party.

Because today’s GOP has gone mostly AWOL in the arena of ideas, this fall, we gathered distinguished conservative scholars and thinkers to publish a special issue proposing a Republican agenda for 2023 and beyond.

We’ve also warned our fellow citizens of the consequences of unchecked Democratic control of the federal government.

With your help, we’re going to keep working and fighting to advance conservative ideas. Indeed, none of this would ever have been possible without our readers and friends. Today’s conservatives are beleaguered on two fronts by a resurgent Left and and parts of the Right that are mired in unseriousness and self-defeat. Every day on NRO and in our biweekly magazine, we fight for a better way.

If you think we have earned it, please consider donating in any amount here to join our cause and keep our enterprise humming.

Yes, we’ve had the devil’s own day. The Right’s debacle is plain to see. But there’s a better way forward and National Review is there to fight for it and advance it. With your help, we’ll lick’em tomorrow.