The Lead Essay
What We Talk About When We Talk About a Nation
National Review Post is less a border on a map than a set of agreements we renew, quietly, every day.
Ask a hundred people what holds a country together and you will get a hundred answers — a flag, a language, a team, a memory of some shared inconvenience endured together. Few will mention the ordinary machinery that actually does the work: the library that stays open, the neighbor who shovels the walk, the small courtesies extended to strangers.
This inaugural issue takes that ordinary machinery seriously. What follows is an attempt to look, without partisanship, at the things a people hold in common — and at what it takes to keep holding them.
By the Editors · Illustration by our contributors