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Give Your Money To Us, Not The Gummint

Hey people, we are almost to the end of the year. We here at The American Conservative would like to remind you that we depend on your donations to keep the show rolling around here. As I said a couple of weeks ago: A decade ago, when The American Conservative was launched, most of organized American conservatism […]

Hey people, we are almost to the end of the year. We here at The American Conservative would like to remind you that we depend on your donations to keep the show rolling around here. As I said a couple of weeks ago:

A decade ago, when The American Conservative was launched, most of organized American conservatism was dead-set against the scrappy little magazine. I should know; I was one of the conservative writers who thought it was the duty of every conservative to line up behind the march to war on Iraq.

I was wrong. TAC was right. Long before I ever came to work at this magazine, I came to value its role as a dissenting voice to the groupthink and ideological straightjacketing that had come to characterize the American right. It’s not that TAC was always correct in its judgments, but it offered a spirited, sensible alternative to propaganda from the Conservative-Industrial Complex. TAC’s orientation is anti-war and very broadly libertarian, but it also makes room for traditional conservatives in the Russell Kirk mold — people like me, whose conservatism is primarily religious and cultural, and who (therefore) do not always line up with libertarians and neocons. I found a home at TAC not because I agree with everything the magazine publishes, but because TAC is intellectually alive. This didn’t just start yesterday. TAC’s 2006 symposium “What Is Left? What Is Right?” showed the kind of challenging conversations this magazine wants to start across old and increasingly meaningless ideological boundaries.

So much American conservatism today is still stuck fighting the political wars of the last two or three decades. TAC is a forum — in print and online — where the next conservatism is being debated and worked out. The ideas this magazine have always stood for are becoming mainstream on the right. For example, when antiwar conservatives and antiwar liberals stood together this past summer to stop the Obama-McCain plans for yet another Middle East intervention, the country saw the kind of political thinking and action championed by this magazine stopping a war sought by Establishment figures of both parties.

I know, I know, we make you mad sometimes. Shoot, sometimes I wonder, “Why did we print that?!” But I am proud to work for a conservative magazine that doesn’t see its mission as nothing more than pleasing everybody in its audience. Rather, we are trying to think through the problems facing both conservatism and the country as a whole, from first principles based in both libertarianism and traditional conservatism. We won’t always agree with you — we don’t always agree with each other — but we do hope to challenge you, and ourselves, to reason beyond the dry-bones orthodoxies of the mainstream Left and Right.

Won’t you help keep us going? Make your tax-deductible donation here. There is no amount to small. And thank you to the readers who have already donated. When you work for a small opinion magazine, you know all too well how every penny counts. We are so grateful that you’re standing by us.

 

 

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