On March 30, 2019, I accepted the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Conservative Book of the Year Award at a ceremony in Chicago. The ceremony was especially meaningful because it took place almost exactly 35 years after I set out for New York, together with a young woman who would later be my wife, to request funds to found Princeton’s conservative magazine, The Princeton Tory. It was our freshman year in college, and the two of us were going to meet with Irving Kristol’s Institute for Educational Affairs. They agreed to back the Tory, which was launched in Fall 1984. ISI is the successor organization of this same Institute, and 35 years later it is still funding the Princeton Tory, as well as administering this book prize. My wife Yael flew with me to Chicago and we received the prize together.
My acceptance speech is not just about The Virtue of Nationalism. It mostly about the condition of the conservative movement and the challenge of re-establishing a national conservatism.
