Classifieds

Commentary
Some time ago, I began keeping a file marked "Conservative Gloominess."
It’s full of articles and animadversions by various hands: dire prognostications about who the next occupant of the White House will be, harrowing descriptions of disarray among conservatives, despairing portraits of U.S. or European society.
What's odd, or at least uncharacteristic, about these bulletins from the abyss is not their substance—to be candid, I have written plenty of items that could justly be filed there—but their tone and what we might call their existential orientation.
From time immemorial conservatives have delighted in writing works with titles like “Leviathan,” “The Decline of the West,” “The Waste Land.”...