In that endeavor, we need your help.
At National Review, we love America.
Does that sound obvious? It ought to. And yet, at present, the obvious things are not always quite as obvious as they should be. Prior to this year’s July 4 celebration, Gallup asked Americans whether they were proud to be American. The results were disgraceful. “A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are ‘extremely’ (41%) or ‘very’ (17%) proud to be an American,” the outlet reported, “down nine percentage points from last year and five points below the prior low from 2020.” By contrast, “In January 2001, when Gallup first asked Americans how proud they were, 87% said they were extremely or very proud.”
Now there is a development that’s worth standing athwart, yelling Stop!
Simply put, we believe that the United States of America is terrific — and we want to keep it that way. In that endeavor, we need your help. Currently, we are running our week-long summer webathon, the purpose of which is to raise enough money to keep doing what we have done since 1955. Running a magazine is expensive. We have staff to pay and a website to host and podcasts to record and lights to keep on, and, put together, that all adds up. With your help, we can pay our bills and focus on the stuff that really matters: making sure that America remains America.
Next year, the United States will be 250 years old. It has been an extraordinary quarter century, and we believe that, if we play our cards right, the next one can be even more extraordinary than the last. Despite the many challenges it faces, the United States is the most free, prosperous, innovative, and fun place in the world. Without it, the course of human history would have been considerably worse. But it was not foreordained that we should have arrived at this point, nor is it guaranteed that our preeminence will remain — especially if too many people come to take it for granted. At our semiquincentennial, we face fiscal trouble at home and military threats from abroad. As was the case in the past, we are capable of overcoming these challenges, but only if we remember who we are.
National Review’s function is to aid in that venture. We are not interested in the living constitutionalism that would suck the life out of our foundational law, or in the habitual preference for novelty that would dismantle the time-honored truth, or in the naïve utopianism that seeks to abolish human nature. Rather, we seek to preserve the reliable axioms that have created this remarkable place, and to remember that, of all the dispositions one might adopt toward the blessings of this country, gratitude is the most appropriate.
