So after outwitting, outplaying, and outlasting Sahar, Scott, Alex, and Jack, I’ve been declared the winner of Survivor: NR Interns (I’m accepting congratulatory gifts). But now that the season is over, so is my summer at National Review. A few parting words:
I was one of those people born with a natural predilection toward conservatism, but my formative adolescent years happened to coincide with the political rise of Donald Trump. That made balanced, cogent conservative commentary hard to find. I became an avid reader of NR because it exemplified a third way on the American right. It refused to be taken hostage by those devoted to the cult of Trump, or by those whose opposition to the man became a matter of religion. At the time, I did not appreciate the scope of Bill Buckley’s legacy, but the fact that National Review stood out as a beacon of reasoned argument among a turbulent sea of appeals to anger, division, and disdain is proof positive that Buckley’s endowment to the conservative movement continues to inspire.
As I compose my final post of the summer, I’m reminded of a speech delivered by the freshly inaugurated Ronald Reagan at CPAC in 1981 (yes, CPAC was normal in those days), outlining the governing philosophy of his new administration. He payed tribute to National Review, of course — “I like to think back about a small, artfully written magazine named National Review, founded in 1955 and ridiculed by the intellectual establishment because it published an editorial that said it would stand athwart the course of history yelling, ‘Stop!’. . .” — but also to the fusionist vision it exemplified:
It’s especially hard to believe that it was only a decade ago, on a cold April day on a small hill in upstate New York, that another of these great thinkers, Frank Meyer, was buried. He’d made the awful journey that so many others had: He pulled himself from the clutches of “The God That Failed,” and then in his writing fashioned a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought — a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism. . . .
Because ours is a consistent philosophy of government, we can be very clear: We do not have a social agenda, separate economic agenda, and a separate foreign agenda. We have one agenda. Just as surely as we seek to put our financial house in order and rebuild our nation’s defenses, so too we seek to protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of schoolchildren by utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgement of a Supreme Being in our classrooms just as we allow such acknowledgements in other public institutions. . . .
That’s why the Marxist vision of man without God must eventually be seen as an empty and a false faith — the second oldest in the world — first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with whispered words of temptation: “Ye shall be as gods.” The crisis of the Western world, Whittaker Chambers reminded us, exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. “The Western world does not know it,” he said about our struggle, “but it already possesses the answer to this problem — but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as communism’s faith in man.”
This is the real task before us: to reassert our commitment as a nation to a law higher than our own, to renew our spiritual strength. Only by building a wall of such spiritual resolve can we, as a free people, hope to protect our own heritage and make it someday the birthright of all men.
As “fusionism” is attacked today from all corners, I’ve tried to advocate for what I see as a robust and historically accurate notion of the fusionist philosophy with dual commitments to order and liberty. Many thanks, of course, to Phil Klein and Judson Berger, who have granted me the freedom to do so while writing about topics that matter deeply to me: religious liberty, Ohio politics, obscure intra-conservative intellectual battles, and, of course, Bill Buckley’s crusade against antisemites.
Thanks as well to my fellow interns — Sahar, Scott, Alex, and Jack — for making the NR office a vibrant and fun place to work. And if you’ve read their farewell posts, you know that an integral part of being a summer intern at NR occurs when Jay Nordlinger enters the office, a cue for us to immediately pick up our chairs and squish into Jay’s office, where he dazzles us with stories of Bill Buckley and those days when conservatives were optimistic and hopeful.
Thanks to Jay and the entire NR staff for a summer of excitement and exhilaration, of learning and of writing. And thanks to you (happy few) readers who followed along and offered your encouragement. If God wills it, perhaps I’ll return to the pages of NR in the days ahead. Either way, a toast as I lift my cup of seltzer on a rainy Friday afternoon in Cleveland:
To National Review, and to the ordered liberty for which it stands.