William F. Buckley described his mission with the then-new National Review as “standing athwart History, yelling stop.” On an institutional level, for the last several decades, the old man’s yelling has been understood as “public education”; owing to tax laws that benefit supposedly non-partisan non-profit institutions, Buckley’s yells and shouts translated into an industry of conservative magazines and think tanks, functioning with varying degrees of effectiveness and sincerity.
Many have written exquisitely rendered accounts of our decline. Cutting and perceptive tweet threads, articles, and books appear daily, taking a scalpel to our current situation. Chronicles of civilizational collapse go back to the Bible, or earlier. We have lost faith, corrupted ourselves and our society and, consequently, everything we love and believe will turn to ash. I understand the appeal of this doomsaying, both temperamentally and intellectually. It’s not shocking that this genre is a specialty of a movement which calls itself “conservative,” for the desire to hold on to the old ways presupposes a love of those old ways, and defense of them against the onslaught of History. Such a movement is, tautologically, both fearful of and disgusted by the future—if, as they say, “current trends continue.”
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