In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that, “unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it.” He was right. And from this we might infer another truth: that if National Review were to disappear, it would be unlikely that it would ever be replaced. They are peculiar things, institutions. One can be in full possession of the history, the lore, and the blueprints, but, if the original vessel is broken, it will not be easily resurrected. Seventy years in, we are what we are. If you would like us to stay that way, we hope you will contribute to our spring webathon.

In the inaugural issue of this magazine, Buckley complained about the proliferation of “radical social experimentation,” noting that:

Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.

We have made progress since then — thanks, in no small part, to the efforts of those who resolved to provide an alternative — but can anyone doubt that we are still tormented by people who match precisely this description? As history shows quite clearly, one never vanquishes the Jacobin instinct; one only suppresses or resists it for a while. For now, American progressivism is in retreat. But this is a political, rather than an ideological, phenomenon. If, tomorrow, the broader Left were to be gifted wide-ranging power in Washington, D.C., and beyond, it would move instantly to advance some of the weirdest and most destructive ideas that it has exhibited in the last 70 years. (Think of those AOC-Bernie rallies as a preview of what could be in store.) It’s not simply that progressives have convinced themself that men are women and that women are men, or that equality is discrimination and that discrimination is equality, or that the best fix for our perilous fiscal situation is to add tens of trillions of dollars to the budget — although all of those positions are zealously held. It is that among the fixed postulates that their movement wishes to dissolve are the nine-judge Supreme Court, the Senate filibuster, the Electoral College, the First and Second Amendments, and, in some corners, the very notion of written and comprehensible law.

A great deal has changed since 1955. A great deal has stayed the same, too. Our position, wrote Buckley, “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.” Could we put it any better today? It is the purpose of National Review to oppose that parasitic bureaucracy, to pour scorn on those revolutionary Ph.D.s, to expose those pressure groups, and to defend that human freedom, and to do so with vim, humor, and, where appropriate, sprezzatura. These are not abstract fights. In just the last five years, the Covid-19 pandemic has accorded us a stark view of what happens when central planners, censors, and zealots are empowered with the full force of the state; the moral panic that peaked with the 1619 Project has reminded us what happens when corrupted institutions bandy together to rewrite history; and the disastrous economic policies of the Biden administration have reminded us that destructive problems such as inflation cannot be assumed to belong to the past. Throughout, National Review remembered the old, hard-learned lessons, and shared them without fear or favor.

In this ongoing endeavor, we have the best team in the business. Pick an area — day-to-day politics, the law, foreign policy, the economy, the state of the culture — and, for my money, our writers make National Review the premier stop on the web. But, alas, this doesn’t come free. We have staff to pay and lights to keep on and travel to arrange, and that stuff adds up. Since our founding, we have relied upon our readers to make up the difference, and, since our founding, our readers have done just that. We hope that you will keep that tradition going, so that we can keep our tradition going. For whatever you might be able to contribute to the cause, thank you.