Help Us Defend America's Greatness

One of the great lines in Disney/Pixar's The Incredibles is early in the film when the superhero Mr. Incredible complains: "No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved!"

We know how he feels, and we understand if you do, too. America and its Founding ideals needed saving, preserving, and defending when National Review was founded in 1955, and they've never stopped needing voices to speak up and make that case. And we've never stopped needing our readers' support to help us do that.

You've responded once again. We are inching closer to our spring webathon goal of $150,000. To reward our most generous donors, we announced a special offer for contributions of $250 or more: an autographed copy of our own Noah Rothman’s groundbreaking new book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America. Noah's work is a vivid reminder that the madness of our moment has very old roots.

Violence -- actual and threatened -- is just one prong of a wider assault on the fortifications of our constitutional order and our deliberative democracy, and we cover it all. The never-ending campaign to discredit the Supreme Court's conservative majority by any means necessary continued this month with another overhyped leak of the Court's private deliberations. Charlie Cooke covered James Carville's plan: “If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should make Puerto Rico and D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13. F*** it. Eat our dust.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, celebrating Virginia's bare-knuckles partisan gerrymander, has pledged “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” Jonathan Last vows that "It Is Time for Ruthless Aggression," arguing that the gerrymander "should be the model for the biggest piece of ruthless aggression of them all: expanding the Supreme Court. Let’s get ruthless."

Somebody needs to be the unyielding bulwark of our system against this radical onslaught. And somebody needs to remember, as well, that the glorious legal architecture of our system is only the frame of the house; our culture and our pursuit of the higher things are the hearth that makes the home. That's where NR entered stage right 71 years ago, and we haven't budged. Will you help us reach our goal? Around 800 loyal readers have already made a donation to our webathon. Any amount helps, from $5 to $5,000 — but if you can manage $250, I heartily recommend it for a signed copy of Noah Rothman’s forthcoming book, which sadly will probably be even timelier before too long than it already is.

America's 250th birthday is almost here. It was a fragile experiment from the beginning, and it will always need saving. Help us keep doing that work.