If you haven’t yet heard, National Review is currently holding an online fundraiser. Our new target is $100,000, and, as I write, we are 75 percent of the way there. Anything you can chip in will help us reach the finish line.
Today, National Review remains as crucial as it was in 1955. Why? Because so many of the same threats still exist. It would be nice if political journalism were a one-time deal — if, that is, we could publish the definitive case against collectivism or for free speech, and then, having vanquished our opponents, ride off into the sunset. Alas, that is not how things work. Every fight we fight must be fought each and every day. To rest is to lose, and to lose is not acceptable.
NR’s Credenda, which was first published in the first issue, makes familiar reading in 2021. Among the convictions it laid out were that “it is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens’ lives, liberty and property” and that “all other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress”; that “truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience”; that “we find ourselves irrevocably at war with communism and shall oppose any substitute for victory”; that “largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies.” These are our fights, too.
Without you, though, we can do very little. Like the British army stranded at Dunkirk, National Review relies for its survival upon the flotilla of little boats that our readership represents. We do not have a billionaire backer or a gargantuan parent company. Here, what you see is what you get. We’re proud of this arrangement — not least because we think we punch well above our weight. But it does make things precarious at times. With your help, we can keep the wolf from the door for yet another year.
