I very much enjoyed Nate Hochman’s ISI speech to young conservatives. As a much older conservative (born the same year as National Review itself), I was thinking the other day about whether things are worse now than when I was growing up. I’m not sure that the world is a worse place now than it was 60 years ago, or that the country is. There were bad world actors (starting with the Soviet Union) back then, too, and we had our domestic challenges (like Jim Crow and the Weather Underground) then and now as well.

But it seems to me that what is most disheartening is that our elites have gotten so much worse. They weren’t perfect then either, of course, and our universities and media have always been liberal, but still: They — and not just universities and the mainstream media but also one of our major political parties and more and more corporate executives — have become more uniformly and extremely Left.

So thank goodness for counter-institutions like ISI and National Review, and all the young conservatives there and elsewhere, that are fighting to resist and change that.