This week was my very last as the Witherspoon Institute’s 2023–2024 Public Discourse Fellow. It has been an important year for me; I am especially grateful for time spent in conversation and reading partnership with Public Discourse’s editor-in-chief, R. J. Snell; for time spent working with our managing editor, Alexandra Davis; and for the opportunity to edit the writing of so many authors much more qualified than I. In just a few weeks I’ll be living in a new state, trying to stay afloat in law school. But only in recent days have I really paused to reflect on how quickly this year has passed––and not just for me.

We’re living at a time when a decade’s worth of news can fill less than a month. A former president dodges a bullet on the campaign trail; the next day he dodges a historic trial. His incumbent rival is forced out of the race, only to be replaced by a simultaneously unremarkable yet “historic” vice president. An embattled Israeli leader visits Washington to defend his nation’s war on terror. Britain’s Tories are mercilessly crushed by Labour after a decade-and-a-half spent languishing in power. Elections in France bring the far Left a stunning victory; “elections” in Venezuela bring the far Left a completely unsurprising “victory.” The Olympics begin in Paris amid arson attacks and a brazen mockery of the Last Supper. 

No doubt, our news cycles will continue to accelerate feverishly, nodding toward modernity’s spiraling addiction to drama, novelty, and the ephemeral. As our politics become “totalized” (read R. J. Snell here), as a new media ecosystem reduces politics to entertainment, and as my fellow Gen Zers fall increasingly into masochistic (i.e., anti-Western) fervor, the pace will pick up. Our public discourse, I’m afraid, will mirror those unfortunate changes. 

But Public Discourse will not. This is a publication whose raison d’être is wholly at odds with these new, and humanly destructive, tendencies. If ennobling discourse is now countercultural, so too is our journal. Like the Witherspoon Institute, PD is an institution that bears witness to a virtuous (and virtuously “slower”) mode of public engagement: engagement that reflects an open-hearted, honest yearning for the common good. I am glad to have been a part of this team. 

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This Month’s Highlights

Read here Jamie Boulding’s reflections on the British Conservative Party’s historic defeat. It is as much a reflection on the Tories’ dismal failure as it is an admonition to three prime political virtues: prudence, moderation, and competence. 

Richard Doerflinger issues a powerful warning to other countries at risk of following some American states down the path toward legalized euthanasia.

Daniel Sonnenfeld, an Israeli student, makes what is ultimately a case for honesty and moderation, signaling to anti-semitic Western protesters the dangers of their approach for the prospect of peace and human flourishing.

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From the Archives

At risk of self indulgence, I want to share a few Public Discourse essays that have played a significant role in my own intellectual development since I began reading PD as a Princeton freshman in 2019.

What We’re Reading Around the Web

Thanks for reading PD. 

Image by lovelyday12 and licensed via Adobe Stock.