After four years, I decided to cancel my National Review subscription. I thought it's a good idea to share them why, and I sent the paper the letter below. I tried to be short, charitable, and to avoid being snarky or pompous. I don't think I succeeded in any of those apart from the charitable part, but I did my best. Here it is:
Dear National Review,
After four years of reading and a couple of months of thinking, I decided to cancel my subscription. In the following, I'd like to explain my decision in the hope that it might do some good.
In 2016, when Donald Trump became the presidential candidate of the Republican party, I, like half of the world, was dumbfounded. I didn't understand how any moderately well-informed person, political affiliation notwithstanding, could vote for a conman, who is a despicable character and a national security threat. It prompted me, a centrist, to dive into conservative journalism. After some trial and error, I ended up with the flagship magazine of the American conservative movement, National Review.
I was happy with my choice. NR provided a diversity of opinion, great writing, new ideas (new for me at least), and thoughtful challenges to my more liberal worldview. I didn't agree with all the articles of course, but at least half of them in every issue gave me something to think about.
However, in the following years, as it became obvious that Donald Trump is exactly the man he had shown himself to be during the primaries, my satisfaction slowly started to erode, step by step.
Donald Trump has trampled on every principle this magazine is purported to care for: character, fiscal responsibility, free trade, Christian values, standing up against dictators, standing up for allies. He has ballooned the deficit. He sucked up to foreign dictators and took the side of Vladimir Putin against his own intelligence services. He abandoned war allies. He dragged the level of political discourse to the gutters. He blackmailed a foreign ally to force it to come up with dirt on his political opponent. He paid off a porn star he had sex with while his wife was in labor. He pardoned his corrupt business partners. He embraced the support of white-supremacists and genuine lunatics who think that the Democrats are literally a pedophile, Satan-worshipping cult led by George Soros. And, in the time when every day almost as many Americans (and on some days more) die in COVID as in 9/11, he held rallies just to be celebrated by thousands of maskless people - who cares who might die because of this. "I take no responsibility at all".
And the Republican Party went along with it. Not reluctantly, not with protests, but with a Lindsey Grahamesque eagerness to please. And, unenthusiastically and grudgingly, National Review went along, too. Yes, it still offered diverse voices. Yes, it called out the most egregious offenses. It never hid its opinion of the president's character. But the objections to Donald Trump never went beyond what is expected from Her Majesty's Opposition. It was always about finding the easiest path not to go against the grain while finding convenient reasons to support it - masquerading as responsible, principled journalism. Toothless and restrained admonitions to Trump, war cries against the most moderate, institutionalist, establishment-type Democratic challenger one could imagine, Joe Biden. The diversity of opinion now includes Conrad Black and Victor David Hanson on one end but stops with Kevin D. Williamson on the other. And even Williamson's GOP-critical pieces are mandatorily embedded between two Democrats-bashing articles from him.
In short, the National Review chose to tolerate the president and support the GOP based on the conviction that the Democrats are even worse than Trump. That opinion could have been held with fairness and integrity. But every time Trump and his enablers did or said something indefensible, Biden grew a bit more menacing. He spoke up against defunding the police and similar radical left idiocies. He refused to jump on packing the court. He believes in compromises and has reached out to the other side. None of these matters a bit - he is still worse than a narcissistic, callous, petty, corrupt ignoramus whose indifference and stupidity has probably killed tens of thousands of Americans, and who is actively spreading Russian propaganda (an American president spreading Russian propaganda!). No critical inquiry into our side except for the most glaring errors. No trace of subtlety in the analysis of the other side. No difference between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. Conveniently, no hard decisions for a right-wing magazine.
The partisanship is as dismaying as obvious. The GOP and even Trump have always been given the benefit of doubt, a generosity that has never been extended to the other side, which is of course a single, monolithic block hellbent on destroying America. Whatever his sons' faults, everyone knows that Biden has never used his office to enrich himself and his family, just as everyone knows that Trump and his family are doing exactly that. Still, the National Review chose to find problems only with Hunter Biden and never with Jared Kushner. When Donald Trump was publicly demanding that his attorney general indict his opponents, National Review worried that Biden wouldn't be a reliable custodian of the constitution. When the NYT revealed Trump's decades-long tax evasion, David Harsanyi of the NR declared this behavior "patriotic". When Donald Trump with half of the GOP is literally trying to steal the election (please forget the anodyne descriptions, like "undermining democracy" - this is plain treason), and his former National Security advisor calls for suspending the constitution and declaring martial law to re-run election, National Review poses the on-line question: "What do you think is the greatest threat to America? Cancel Culture or Socialism?"
I was relieved to see that at least in this madness, National Review refused to follow the rest of the right-wing media (even though it still deems the doctoral title of Jill Biden as scandalous as the call of Trump-loyalists for the execution of a public official). But when the line to make a stand is simply between being a democracy or a Banana-republic, that's a very low bar. No decent citizen needs journalists and political thinkers to tell him or her how to make a judgment on that. Republican congressmen and prominent right-wing media personalities are working with the gleeful support from Russia and China on destroying the most fundamental democratic norm - the bipartisan transfer of power. You have to be an intellectual to see nuance into it.
Arguably the most valuable and generally unappreciated gift from Trump presidency is that it provided a once in a lifetime opportunity to test your character. Standing up for decency and principles has never been less risky. In darker ages and places, one could pay for it with her life. In today's America, the penalty was angry tweets from the Crybaby-in-Chief. For the overwhelming majority of the GOP-members, that was too much. But there were conservatives and even Republicans who stood by what they believed in the face of ostracism and sometimes financial difficulties. They are the Never Trumpers, the erstwhile allies National Review never ceased to disparage while itself stayed in the warm and secure nest.
If I want to read good writing and excellent opinion pieces informed by conservative ideas, I could still find both in the National Review. But the amount of confirmation bias, self-delusion, and hypocrisy I would need to wade through is just too much. NR is still the flagship of intellectual conservatism. But that aspect is of secondary importance. First and foremost, the magazine exists to serve the GOP, which, having thrown away every principle it ever claimed to believe in, only exists to oppose Democrats.
Goodbye for now, with the hope that one day we can meet again.
Sincerely,
The Editors of New Vac Times
