Whenever thinking about our magazine’s value in American life, I’m put in mind of Frank Capra’s post-World War II film It’s a Wonderful Life. In that unforgettable movie, which takes place in the fictional town of Bedford Falls, New York, in the Christmas season of 1945, the protagonist George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, is considering suicide after having suffered unjustly incurred financial loss at the hands of a hostile banker. Fortunately, Clarence, a second-degree guardian angel seeking to gain his wings, comes to George’s aid as he’s about to end his life by plunging into an icy, turbulent river.

The angel reminds George of all the self-sacrificing good deeds he has performed, such as rescuing his brother as a child from drowning, caring for his fellow townspeople by financing the building of comfortable, low-priced housing, and being an attentive father and husband. Clarence adds to his exhortation a picture of how much less well-off those who belonged to George’s life would be if he had never lived.

The lesson is not lost on George, who predictably opts to re-embrace his money-strapped existence. Fortunately, once he returns home to his wife (portrayed by the delightful Donna Reed) and his offspring, megabucks unexpectedly pour in from well-wishers; and George is freed of the monetary worries that led him to contemplate suicide earlier that evening.

It should be clear why the movie’s ending would be relevant for at this time of the year to Chronicles readers. It’s a Wonderful Life deals with someone trying to address a seemingly insurmountable financial crisis. But there is something else in that superlative movie that deserves mention. It is the alternate reality that we see, one in which George never existed as a member of the Bedford Falls community. What exactly would American political culture look like, we might ask, if Chronicles hadnever existed or if it ceased to exist?

In the 1980s and 1990s, we were the main and, for a while, the only significant voice on the right resisting a total or near total takeover of conservatism by neoconservatives. Well into the 1990s, we remained a match for our opponents, many of whose survivors have now gone over to that dark side occupied by Kamala and Tampon Tim. Although the conservative establishment always hesitated to accept paleoconservatives as allies, many of our arguments against the neoconservatives became part of the polemical arsenal of those who are ascendant on the right today, even among those who are less traditionalist.

We at Chronicles were among the first to offer reasoned, cogent arguments against a globalist foreign policy, a so-called “human-rights based ideology, and a xenophile approach to immigration. Our magazine has also been among the very few publications that continue to view the carnage of the American Civil War as the result of an unnecessary conflict. We take that position, by the way, not to hold on to pro-Confederate readers but because we believe it’s the correct historical one.  We suffered the indignity of being attacked on what in the early- and mid- aughts passed for the right for opposing the “war of choice” against Iraq, most egregiously by David Frum in a screed (not surprisingly) published in National Review. At that time the magazine’s founder, William F. Buckley, was tilting toward our side about the Iraqi invasion. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t admit to his position for what seem to have been social reasons, and so he decided to allow us to be defamed in his publication.

Let’s look at what we have done more recently. We have managed to publish both friendly and critical articles and commentaries on the Israeli government; and we’ve presented a wide range of positions on the Russian-Ukrainian War. Perhaps to our detriment, we have never engaged in the cultic worship of Martin Luther King, Jr., even when that mere mortal went almost overnight from being a demagogue to a demigod in the conservative movement.

Moreover, we have published essays that treat the entire civil rights movement from the 1950s on as the prehistory of our present anti-discrimination regime. In this case, we believe successive, contiguous events did lead to a likely outcome. Although ours has ceased to be the fashionable view in the conservative movement, we continue to present it, because it seems to be the correct understanding of how we got to where we are politically and socially. At the same time, we present the more conventional GOP view, that the movement for equal rights for blacks and women started out as something very admirable but was derailed sometime in the late 1960s. That clearly is not my view or that of most of our editors, but we remain open to dissenting commentaries, since we are probably not in any danger (at least not in my view) of losing our brand.

 It is also to our credit that, unlike the conservative establishment and those magazines that will remain nameless, we are setting an example of intellectual tolerance. We are both the most traditionally conservative and the most intellectually tolerant magazine on the right.

We may likewise be the only magazine associated with the right that clearly distinguishes between an older Marxist left and its intersectional successor. The practice of treating the two lefts as indistinguishable is both misguided und misleading. It causes those on the right to overlook how much more devastating and unstoppable the present cultural and moral radicalism is from what it replaced. It is not socialism but a form of cultural nihilism that we are fighting, one being heavily subsidized by crony capitalists in alliance with public administration and the mass media. Treating wokeism as just the new face of Marxism, Chronicles has argued, overlooks what is uniquely poisonous about this enemy. But it allows the conservative establishment to make its peace with elements of the woke left while declaring war on a largely obsolete Marxist foe. 

Significantly, the positions we have taken do resonate with a younger generation on the right. In fact, it amazes me how as one proceeds from the Boomer generation toward Gen Z, one encounters more and more journalists and podcasters who sound very much like us. 

While at a National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C. last July, I was astounded by how many young people I found holding characteristically paleo positions on a wide range of topics and concerns. Most of these young people do not subscribe to Chronicles, although some of them do read us in libraries, on the web, and in bookstores and are clearly influenced by our thought. The downside is we’re not extracting monetary benefit from these devotees, even while our ideas are affecting them.

To repeat my main point: We are much too independent to attract moderate, go-with-the-flow donors. After decades of serving as an object lesson for the establishment of what happens to crotchety eccentrics on the right who go their own way, we are not likely to win over those who have scorned us for decades. We are therefore turning to friends to ask for help. The question I posed earlier is the one that I’ll leave you with: How much is it worth to you to help our publication survive and grow? For without your assistance, we may be unable to do either.