For the improvement of their junior colleagues, the elders at National Review would from time to time issue lists of proscribed activities. We all received first-edition copies of (James) Burnham’s Laws, and then (William) Rusher’s Rules, and then (William) Rickenbacker’s Verities. (The formula, frequently, was three parts stricture to one part witticism, with the latter serving as emollient to the former.) These were sacred texts and we were advised to read them, and then to rearrange our lives so as to bring them into compliance. Some of the junior colleagues may have done so.
I am not by status an inscriber of tablets, nor by temperament a promulgator of regulation, but I have a few thoughts for your consideration in this season.
• Pause a minute every day to remind yourself why so many black and brown people try to sneak into our country. (Hint: It’s not to get in on the systemic racism.)
• Listen to the market. It almost always knows better.
• It may be premature to celebrate the failure of the illiberals’ effort to monument-topple Friedrich Hayek. In the spirit of the season, I invite you to do so, anyway.
• But be mindful of the cautionary footnote added by, of all people, Lord Keynes, who once noted that “markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
• Note that when somebody says he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in a phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard University, he’s talking about the Harvard people more than the phonebook people.
• For the politically involved among you, please remember how James Madison rigged American elections: Coalitions win and factions lose.
• And please don’t forget to recover your politically wounded. We have no legions in reserve.
• If you are open to counsel on the subject of personal modesty from Charles de Gaulle, you might in your own puffed-up moments take guidance from the General’s observation that the “cemeteries of the world are filled with indispensable men.”
• And wouldn’t you love to see the media or the GOP or Taylor Swift or Lionel Messi or somebody push the Biden White House into explaining its border policy?
• Save yourself some quality time and get off Twitter or X or whatever they’re calling it this morning. On social media, every day is Festivus.
• When a good friend stumbles, call him immediately. Not to commiserate — that’s for Liberals — but to help. (A good friend recently gave me this useful definition of a good friendship: It’s when you say you need your friend to meet you in Chicago on Thursday at 3:30 and he responds with, “What’s the address?”)
• While it’s true that any old tyrant can give us tyranny, and that any old anarchist can give us anarchy, only America can give us the golden oxymoron of ordered liberty.
• It seems true, as well, that if we as a nation ever attenuate our commitment to personal freedoms, the best possible outcome for America would be a soft despotism in which a few of our old friends would be briefly in charge.
• Especially over the holidays, try not to judge people by their in-laws.
• It has now been baked in the fiscal cake that we will soon be spending more on debt service than national defense. Can a House so indebted long endure?
• Pacta sunt servanda, dammit.
• Johnson, for once, had it wrong. The last refuge of the scoundrel is antisemitism.
• The wondrous Karine Jean-Pierre said the other day that, on some subject or another, “The president has been very clear.” She says that a lot. The next time the president is very clear on any subject whatsoever will be the first time in three years.
• I have heeded too infrequently the wisdom of a friend in downeast Maine who once told me that life is simpler when you plow around the stump.
• One of the satisfactions of a life both long and contentious is the lascivious sensation that, because you have survived your opponents, you could in some possibly significant way be adjudged their superior.
• I am surprised to find that I now think Mark Twain had it right when he wrote that “20 years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” In my own case, I threw off the bowlines, as Twain had instructed, and I was lucky enough, now and then at least, to catch the trade winds. But I only rarely sailed great distance from the safe harbor. Opportunity costs can be costly.
• I offload onto you only a single burden. You may think you’ve heard the footsteps of the mindless mob, seemingly in monument-toppling ardor, coming for William F. Buckley Jr. I think you heard right and you must resist that mob. WFB was a prince among men. His only crime was that he was a God-fearing, Constitution-minding, tradition-revering, market-respecting male back when those things were acceptable. As our old friend Mort Sahl used to say, “Anyone who maintains a consistent position in America will eventually be tried for treason.”
• And, finally, the Big One — what’s the greatest happiness in life? I’m still working on my own, and I can’t speak for Jim or Rick, but Bill Rusher would have in some measure enjoyed Conan’s answer: “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”
Have a grateful Thanksgiving.