When Chris Hughes took over The New Republic, the initial reaction was ecstatic. Here was a man deep-pocketed enough to finally ensure that this landmark magazine, an institution in American politics and letters, would be able to continue its mission notwithstanding the very difficult landscape for journalism. Here was the sugar daddy they’d been waiting for.

Some months later, a very different assessment obtains.

The American Conservative, like TNR, struggles to survive and thrive in that treacherous media landscape. To achieve our mission, we need to spread the work of our contributors as widely as possible, which means not hiding behind a paywall. Traditional web advertising never paid well, and pays worse and worse over time. And more contemporary strategies of reader manipulation – semi-pornographic click-bait, “native” advertising, etc. – which pose a threat generally to the integrity of journalism pose an even greater threat to a magazine with our mission.

And so does reliance on a sugar daddy. It’s not just that you never know whether his or her plans will ultimately dovetail with the mission of the organization, that we don’t want to risk that mission becoming service to the whims and obsessions of a particular owner. It’s that our mission is, in some ways, inherently uncongenial to the sort of person who buys a magazine like ours.

People who buy journals of opinion generally do it to achieve prestige and influence. In its heyday, TNR was known as the in-flight magazine of Air Force One. It set out, consciously, to shape the agenda in Washington, both by advancing specific ideas and policies and more generally by setting the terms of debate.

TAC is not trying to set the terms of debate; we are trying to open up those terms. We are not trying to be the in-flight magazine of Air Force One. We are not merely providing power with a better set of ideas – we are raising questions about the distribution of power as such. Our mission is populist in that most basic sense.

Which is why, as a financial proposition, we have to rely not on deep pockets, but on many.

Our course, we do get some support from relatively deep-pocketed individuals – not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door, as the poet said, but we hope they’ll serve. They want to know, though, that there is a wider base of support out there that can be tapped, that we matter as much as we believe we do to enough people. That we are getting through.

To that end, two of our supporters have offered to match donations made through the end of the calendar year, up to $20,000.

The goal is not just to raise money, though that is very much needed. It’s also to determine how wide that base of committed support is. So even if – especially if – you can only reasonably make a small donation, now would be a very good time to do it.

You can make fully tax-deductible contributions here.