Chronicles has become TAC; TAC has become NR; NR has become The Atlantic, etc. (Interestingly enough, The Atlantic now & then publishes a good article.) Chronicles at its best, I thought, eschewed comment on current events, except to contrast it to classical age culture, or Florence in the high Middle Ages. They mainly concentrated on culture, the permanent things, the ancient verities, what have you. In the 90s, I read it cover to cover, and it was like a monthly silent retreat. I read a lot of the literature they reviewed favorably, or the classics to which they alluded, and I always felt like that was what kept my furnace stoked a lot more than the tossed-off ghostwritten tomes of the Con-Ink commentariat (Killing Western Civ, anyone?) ever could.

(It should be said, in all fairness, that Dreher is far from the worst writer in that space; that dubious distinction rightfully belongs to the younger cohort—Devlin, Leary, Richardson—whose collective output is a colorless mush of editorializing prose. If nothing else, Dreher is at least an effective aggregator for more useful [and more tightly written] material on the culture wars and invites robust feedback from his readership.)

So I am thankful for your brave voice, Mrs. Mercer, and for the brisk writing style in which it is rendered. Thanks also for hosting the likes of Juvenal Early and Fred Reed on this blog—they have been a welcome supplement to your own brand of polemic. The former contributor, in particular, has been cathartic to read.

P.S. My father recently gave me a stack of old Chronicles issues from the late 90s and early 2000s. It was a more bracing and percipient magazine back then. Browsing the assorted contributions, it’s uncanny how early they perceived the key dynamics driving the cultural revolution and national decline which has only intensified in the interim decades. (They sometimes underestimated how crazy things would get…)

Here’s the column you mentioned:

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2021/10/west-survive-christians-must-toughen/