The first issue of this magazine appeared in September 1995, part way through the Clinton administration, and less than a year after the Republican victory in the congressional elections of 1994. The pressing foreign policy issue of the day was Bosnia. The world seems a very different place today. To mark our 10th anniversary, we invited several of our valued contributors to reflect on the decade past and, at least indirectly, on the years ahead. More specifically, we asked them to address this question: "On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?" Their responses follow.
THE HISTORY OF THIS MAGAZINE is cloven pretty neatly down the middle by September 11, 2001. Certain of the battles fought in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD in the half-decade before have been revealed as irrelevant in the half-decade since.
My portfolio of political beliefs has changed little, aside from a major sell-off of libertarian absolutism, which this decade has exposed as overvalued. On the big issues of the late 1990s, I still think the impeachment of Clinton was a reckless endangerment of the Constitution and that the Haiti and Kosovo wars were exercises in moral self-regard, to little end.
But the attacks on the World Trade Center lowered the temperature of almost all my political beliefs to way below boiling. They revealed most political stuff as simply not worth getting riled up over. Defending the country against attack is a first-order issue. Defending the country against, say, gay marriage or affirmative action (or promoting them, as the case may be) is a second-order issue. Defending the country against, say, bias at the television networks is an irrelevancy that I would not take 20 minutes away from my novel-reading to worry about. It surprises me a bit that not everyone reacted this way to September 11. Americans' propensity to squabble over partisan trivia has, if anything, grown, particularly on the left. Political vanity is unshakable. It's ironclad.
Or maybe I have changed. I'll admit that Tony Blair, who drove me up the wall from the time he took office in 1997 until the Kosovo crisis in 1999, now strikes me as the towering political figure of our time.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.