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.
TEN YEARS AGO it seemed impossible that conservatives would enter the zoo-house of American culture with hose and broom and put things back into decent shape so a normal person could go inside and not be overwhelmed by the fumes of unregenerate anti-intellectualism, anti-Americanism, and sheer hatred of art, literature, and religion. Conservatives seemed to care about politics exclusively. So long as they won elections, U.S. culture could go hang. Today the cultural mainstream is still left-liberal, but things are changing fast.
A decade ago several problems seemed representative. No one dared or cared to start a new conservative book-review weekly in New York. Books are the center of intellectual life, New York is the center of book publishing, and it seemed insane that conservatives should allow the field to be dominated by two left-liberal weeklies. (The New York Times Book Review has changed for the better since then.) New York was meant to have one book weekly on the left (the Times) and one on the right (the Herald Tribune). Since the Tribune died in the '60s, the field has been grossly unbalanced; but conservatives didn't seem to care.
Abolishing the federal holidays to honor Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays was a mistake and should have been undone. And I awaited the moment when some brave politician would stand in front of the Vietnam memorial (a black slab in a pit) and say "Tear down this wall! Remove it from its symbolic grave and rebuild it above ground, and for God's sake add some words of tribute and thanks."
None of these things ever happened. But there have been many other developments. Conservatives are far less culturally complacent than I feared.
Talk radio was already important then and is vastly more so now. Fox has made it safe to watch TV news again. Conservative blogs like Power Line and many others have knocked the news game sideways. Conservative think tanks like AEI, the Manhattan Institute, and many more (e.g., the Shalem Center in Israel) rank among the most important intellectual centers in the world. Within the next generation, some are bound to become full-fledged, degree-granting institutions with graduate students desperate to get in.
Several big wheels of establishment journalism have made themselves ridiculous (with a little help from conservative blogs). There's a new conservative newspaper in New York (who would ever have believed it?), and it's doing fine. There are several new conservative book publishing houses. The New York art world no longer defines its mission exclusively in terms of fomenting hatred for white American males and Christianity. The main conservative magazines (such as this one) have never looked better. And Norman Podhoretz has published a book about the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. That a brilliant literary critic should have devoted nearly all his time to politics symbolized the long-lasting political state of emergency. But the emergency seems to have quieted from orange to yellow, or to eggshell pink (or something), and the culture bosses of the left had better enjoy their cultural predominance while it lasts. They have been numbered, weighed, and found wanting. They are on the way out.
David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.